A hybrid decision support system for managing humanitarian relief chains

Abstract

Decisions regarding location, allocation and distribution of relief items are among the main concerns of the humanitarian relief chain (HRC) managers in response to no-notice large-scale disasters such as earthquakes. In this paper, a hybrid decision support system (HDSS) consisting of a simulator, a rule-based inference engine, and a knowledge-based system (KBS) is developed to configure a three level HRC. Three main performance measures including the coverage, total cost, and response time are considered to make an explicit trade-off analysis between the cost efficiency and responsiveness of the designed HRC. In the first step, the simulator calculates the performance measures of the different configurations of the HRC under a number of generated disaster scenarios. Then, the rule-based inference engine attempts to build the best configuration of the HRC including facilities' locations, relief items' allocation and distribution plan of the scenario under investigation based on the calculated performance measures. Finally, the best configuration for each scenario is stored in the KBS as the extracted knowledge from the above analyses. In this way, the HRC managers can retrieve the most appropriate HRC configuration in accordance with the realized post-disaster scenario in an effective and timely manner. The results of a real case study in Tehran demonstrate that the developed HDSS is an effective tool for fast configuration of HRCs using stochastic data.