A Two Stage Vehicle Routing Algorithm Applied to Disaster Relief Logistics after the 2015 Nepal Earthquake

After the April 2015 Nepal Earthquake, the Himalayan Disaster Relief Volunteer Group distributed supplies to affected areas. We model HDRVG's operations as a vehicle routing problem using Fisher and Jaikumar's two stage method, which allocates locations to vehicles via an integer program and then uses heuristics to route the vehicles. In the allocation stage, we use the assignment problem formulation to assign locations to vehicles. In the routing stage, we implement multiple heuristics for the sake of comparison. Our results illustrate the open nature of the vehicle routing problem and the computational necessity of heuristics. Presented at the 2017 Pi Mu Epsilon conference (awarded the PME 2017 Mathematical Association of America Environmental Mathematics Special Interest Group Student Speaker Award). Submitted to SIURO (waiting for reply). Code for the project can be found here: github.com