Resiliency of the Area-Segmentation in Vehicle Routing for Collecting the Disaster Information

The emergency disaster response headquarters (HQ) is responsible for incrementally collecting the disaster information from the whole area of a region. Our previous work studied a routing problem for patrolling vehicles to monitor such information and bring it to HQ multiple times on the way. The optimal routes for vehicles can be found by a systematic search to minimize the average delay time for the information collection. Further, we have also studied an area-segmentation approach in which each vehicle collects the information only in one of sub-areas. However, in disaster situations, some parts of the vehicles’ routes are likely to be damaged, incurring a considerable delay of information collection. In this paper, we investigate the resiliency of area-segmentations with different topologies, damaged locations, and delays incurred by damaged links. Our simulation results show that the area-segmentation approach is more robust than the whole-area approach in some cases by mitigating the risk of a large delay in information collection.