查看文章

Decisions regarding location, allocation and distribution of relief items are among the main concerns of the humanitarian relief chain (HRC) managers in response to no-notice large-scale disasters such as earthquakes. In this paper, a hybrid decision support system (HDSS) consisting of a simulator, a rule-based inference engine, and a knowledge-based system (KBS) is developed to configure a three level HRC. Three main performance measures including the coverage, total cost, and response time are considered to make an explicit trade-off analysis between the cost efficiency and responsiveness of the designed HRC. In the first step, the simulator calculates the performance measures of the different configurations of the HRC under a number of generated disaster scenarios. Then, the rule-based inference engine attempts to build the best configuration of the HRC including facilities' locations, relief items' …