Online routing and scheduling of search‑and‑rescue teams

Abstract

We study how to allocate and route search-and-rescue teams to areas with trapped victims in a coordinated manner after a disaster. We propose two online strategies for these time-critical decisions considering the uncertainty about the operation times required to rescue the victims and the condition of the roads that may delay the operations. First, we follow the theoretical competitive analysis approach that takes a worst-case perspective and prove lower bounds on the competitive ratio of the two variants of the defined online problem with makespan and weighted latency objectives. Then, we test the proposed online strategies and observe their good performance against the offline optimal solutions on randomly generated instances.