Location and allocation of primary and backup shelters in transboundary disasters

Abstract

Disaster management is plagued by uncertainty and chaotic situations, often crossing boundaries and affecting multiple jurisdictions. Collaboration in these settings is complicated, especially when authorities face failure in the infrastructure available leading to facilities operating over capacity and/or vulnerable people left without support. There are records about those experiences globally. There is a broad literature on shelter location/allocation, but few articles consider the potential failure facilities and none of those contributions consider the collaboration between multiple jurisdictions. This article introduces a novel bi-objective formulation for shelter location-allocation considering backup facilities for operations involving multiple jurisdictions. This approach is applied to a set of numerical examples and a real case of volcanic eruptions in Mexico. The results show the influence of transboundary coordination on the support provided to disaster victims, the value of backup facilities and the capacity of the model design to provide relevant alternatives in practice.