Location and allocation of primary and backup shelters in transboundary disasters

Abstract

There are records of people being unable to find shelter after a disaster or reaching facilities operating over capacity because of facility failure. Natural hazards do not respect geographical or political boundaries and often surpass the capacity of single jurisdictions operating with limited resources. Coordination between jurisdictions can become a solution, but it has been neglected in the literature. This article is the first to investigate the use of backup facilities as a strategy facilitated by transboundary coordination. It proposes a novel solution incorporating collaboration between multiple jurisdictions to establish a shelter location-allocation approach to protect people affected by disasters considering facility failure. The article presents a stochastic bi-objective formulation for transboundary coordination, incorporating the responsibility, priorities, and resources of each jurisdiction whilst considering the possibility of facility failure during disaster management. The objective of the model is to provide shelter to beneficiaries of all the jurisdictions by pooling resources whilst reducing the travel distance and minimizing the maximum cost for each jurisdiction. The contribution of the article is to introduce the formulation, assess the impact of transboundary coordination, and analyze the value of backup facilities in the service provided to people affected by disasters. The model has been applied to a set of numerical examples and a real case of volcanic eruptions in Mexico. The results show the influence of cross-jurisdictional 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.