Abstract
Humanitarian organizations pre-position relief items in pre-disaster and distribute them to the affected areas in post-disaster. Improper planning of emergency operations causes more deaths in post-disaster. In this paper, the problem of relief item pre-positioning and multi-period distribution planning is addressed considering lateral transhipment among distribution centres to improve the efficiency of the humanitarian relief chain. The proposed model not only improves cost efficiency of the relief chain, but also enhances the equity and fairness. Therefore, a multi-objective two-stage stochastic programming, which involves imprecise parameters, is developed to address the problem. Moreover, TH method is utilized to solve the proposed multi-objective programming and efficient possibilistic programming is adopted to deal with the imprecise input parameters. Applicability of the proposed model and the effectiveness of the solutions are examined through a numerical analysis. Finally, sensitivity analyses are conducted on key input parameters to extract managerial insights.
Highlights
Over the past decade, the number of natural disasters, such as tornados, floods, forest fires, and extreme cold, has increased and affected millions of people’s lives and cities, leaving a lot of their assets and resources damaged
It is revealed that how humanitarian relief supply chain in disaster management is important to control the flow of resources to provide the affected people with relief
We propose a two-stage stochastic programming for integrating relief pre-positioning and distribution planning, considering the lateral transhipment and disruption in supply facilities
Summary
The number of natural disasters, such as tornados, floods, forest fires, and extreme cold, has increased and affected millions of people’s lives and cities, leaving a lot of their assets and resources damaged. Distributing relief items to the affected areas is one of the most important steps in humanitarian operations, which can be disrupted because of total/partial damage to warehouses’ capacity, distribution centres, suppliers, and infrastructures. This could result in unmet relief item demands and death in the affected areas (Çelik 2016). We have formulated a multi-objective two-stage stochastic programming in order to design a humanitarian relief supply chain including relief suppliers, central warehouses (CWs), local distribution centres (LDCs), and affected areas. The proposed model selected the location of CWs and reliable and unreliable LDCs among the candidate locations It determined the quantity of relief items pre-positioned in them by suppliers in pre-disaster. The conclusion and further research are presented in “Managerial insights” section
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