Chinese national emergency warehouse location research based on VNS algorithm

China is one of the countries suffering from the most disasters in the world, so national emergency warehouse location is critical for the country to reduce loss resulting from disasters. Considering that emergency management is more concerned about effectiveness than efficiency, the paper proposes an emergency warehouse location problem (EWLP) model-an extension of the classic P-center model, for the Chinese national emergency warehouse location problem. Some features, including population distribution, economic condition, transportation, and multi-coverage for some vital areas, are put into the proposed model, which are characterized with data gathered from the reality. A Variable Neighborhood Search (VNS) based heuristic algorithm is developed to solve the extensional model. The computational result gained is cmopared with current emergency warehouse location planning in China. It is shown that huge saving can be gained with the guarantee that the rescue resources could be delivered in time. Moreover, the proposed VNS based algorithm shows its good performance in the computational experiment.