D-Optimal Orienteering for Post-Earthquake Reconnaissance Planning

Immediately following a major earthquake, reconnaissance surveys seek to assess structural damage throughout the region with the help of a limited number of on-ground inspections. The goal is to collect informative and representative data that will guide subsequent relief efforts. We formulate a new type of vehicle routing problem, in which vehicles are tasked with data collection, and the objective function measures data quality using a nonlinear, nonseparable experimental design criterion. We create novel exact methods for this problem and demonstrate their practical potential in a realistic case study using a state-of-the-art earthquake simulator.

Funding: J. Wang, I. O. Ryzhov, N. Marković, and G. Ou acknowledge the support of the National Science Foundation (NSF) Division of Civil, Mechanical and Manufacturing Innovation [Grant 2112828]. W. Xie acknowledges the support of the NSF Division of Computing and Communication Foundations [Grant 2246417].

Supplemental Material: All supplemental materials, including the code, data, and files required to reproduce the results, are available at https://doi.org/10.1287/opre.2023.0470.