Research On Method For Selecting Distribution Center Location For Nature Disaster Emergency Relief

Location of distribution centers is one of the key problems during emergencyrelief material dispatching activities for severe natural disasters. Distributioncenters can be used to make up smooth transport channel by which the reliefmaterials are delivered to the disastered areas in the shortest time. Compared withthe traditional distribution center location problem in normal social and ecomicconditions, distribution center location problem during emergency relief activitieshave some characteristics such as emergency, temporary, etc, which makes itdifferent. So far, there are few achievements on this problem. In this dissertation,we manily focus on studying characteristics and decision models for this problem.The main contributions of this dissertation are as follows:Firstly, problem of distribution center location during dispatching andtransporting emergency relief materials for natural disasters is proposed and itscharacteristics are studied. Differences and relations with the traditionaldistribution center location in normal social and ecomic conditions, and locationfor fire stations, emergency center and shelters in the background of public safetyin one city are analyzed in detail.Secondly, a decision model based on improved AHP method for distributioncenter location during natural disaster ermergency activities is proposed to improvedecision efficiency. Based on analysis of factors influencing this kind of decisioncenter location, some factors, which are dominant or which information are easilycollected, are chosen and are decomposed to form a hierarchy framework used forAHP. For overcoming the deficiencies in handling large scale judgement matricesand consistency verification, the AHP method is improved to automaticallyconstruct large judgement matrices by using crosstie model. This decision model isdiscussed in detail and an example is illustrated.Thirdly, with the observation to the distribution centers for natural disasteremergency relief, the hierarchy framework has been summarized. Consideringthe construction costs, transport time, etc, an optimization model orientedmulti-level distribution center is established and its solution is discussed.