Abstract
This paper describes the facility location problem of mobile relay stations which connect the head office and sensing vehicles for the fast and accurate communication in the case of disaster or urgent situation. The optimal decision of locating relay stations and assigning the radio frequencies for the robust and accurate communication are discussed. The major feature of this paper is that the robustness for multiple communication paths and the high accuracy of communication should be held even if any one of the relay stations becomes out of use. This problem can be formulated as the min-max decision problem of minimizing the decrease of the communication power, which is the combined concept of the number of redundant paths and the communication accuracy, when the most critical station is damaged. This paper proposes a solution method for this nonlinear integer programming problem using the simulated annealing with matrix calculation. The efficiency of the proposed method is shown for concrete numerical examples.
