Distributionally Robust and Learning-Based Vehicle Routing for Disaster Blood Logistics

In humanitarian disasters, delivering blood and blood products rapidly and reliably is critical but logistically complex. This paper proposes a hybrid framework that integrates Distributionally Robust Optimization (DRO) for offline anticipative planning with Contextual Bandits for online adaptive ve...

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Bibliographic Details
Main Author: I. Hssini
Format: Article
Language:English
Published: IEEE 2025-01-01
Series:IEEE Access
Subjects:
Online Access:https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/11059272/
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Summary:In humanitarian disasters, delivering blood and blood products rapidly and reliably is critical but logistically complex. This paper proposes a hybrid framework that integrates Distributionally Robust Optimization (DRO) for offline anticipative planning with Contextual Bandits for online adaptive vehicle dispatch. The system coordinates a heterogeneous fleet of ambulances, drones, and robots to navigate uncertain demand, infrastructure degradation, and time-sensitive deliveries. We formulate a two-level approach: a robust vehicle routing problem accounting for moment-based uncertainty in demand, and an online dispatch policy that learns context-aware allocation decisions in real time. Extensive simulations evaluate the proposed method against DRO-only, CB-only, and stochastic routing baselines. Results show that the hybrid approach outperforms all others in robustness, service rate, and delay, while maintaining reasonable computational efficiency.
ISSN:2169-3536