A decomposition-based heuristic for a multicrew coordinated road restoration problem

Natural disasters disrupt the connectivity of road networks by blocking road segments, which impedes efficient distribution of relief materials to the affected area. We study the problem of finding coordinated paths for clearing teams so that the connectivity of the road network is regained in the shortest time. We provide an efficient novel heuristic algorithm for this problem. In our algorithm, the problem is first pre-processed to define a binary problem to generate initial solutions, and then several rich and problem-specific neighborhood search moves are applied to improve the derived initial solutions. We provide several analytical results which facilitate the design of our algorithm. The performance of our proposed algorithm is assessed by different numerical experiments, and a comparison with existing algorithms from the literature using instances from Istanbul road networks. The results demonstrate that our algorithm performs notably better, both in terms of speed, and proximity to optimal solution. •Debris from a disaster blocks some roads and disconnects the road network.•Multiple teams are dispatched to regain the connectivity of the road network.•A blocked road can only be used after the accumulated debris are cleared by a team.•A novel algorithm that uses rich local search for improvement phase is introduced.•This algorithm outperforms existing algorithms in all the tested instances.