3. Methodology
Optimal allocation of SAR resources is a strategic process which is to be carried out with an excellent plan to react to all incidents at sea rapidly to increase the rate of survivals and decrease material damages. Furthermore, construction of an allocation model must consider some key factors such as:
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Historical data of incidents in the area of interest.
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Types, requirements and severity of incidents.
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Resource limits.
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Geographical factors.
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Available ports and their limitations.
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Business rules of the organization.
In this study, all above factors were taken into account and IB-BAM was formulated with the methodology displayed in Fig. 2. Briefly, this methodology includes three major steps: (Step-1) determining incident type weights, (Step-2) the ZDM and (Step-3) the optimization model. Now we describe the key aspects of IB-BAM in more detail.