Abstract: Aiming at the take of the vehicle routing optimization of emergency material distribution in the urban emergency environment, the influence of urban road congestion on the speed of the vehicle was analyzed. Take the least time and cost of the vehicle as object, a routing optimization model of bi-level programming is built. To improve the global search and local search capability, an improved two stage firefly algorithm was employed to solve the problem. The numerical example shows that the proposed model and algorithm can effectively solve the problem of emergency material distribution in urban emergency.