Abstract
Alleviating human sufferings during and in the aftermath of disasters is one of the most important goals in humanitarian relief logistics. The lack of relief commodities, especially life-saving items, is a life-threatening loss to victims and must be considered when making emergency supply allocation and transportation decisions, even in the pre-disaster prepositioning phase. This paper proposes a scenario-based stochastic program that integrates the decisions of prepositioning facility locations, quantities of stocked emergency supplies, and service allocations in each scenario in the same modeling framework. The estimation of victims’ losses for waiting for emergency supplies is measured in the typical deprivation cost function and treated as one of the main bases of decision making, besides traditional transportation costs, in determining the service allocation strategies in each scenario. Specifically, a case study with data from the hurricane threat in the Gulf Coast area of the US was conducted to demonstrate the application of this model and the significance of considering victims’ welfare loss in humanitarian relief logistics. Some interesting managerial insights were also drawn from a series of numerical experiments and sensitivity analyses.
Highlights
Catastrophic disasters usually bring tremendous damages to the functioning of a community or society, resulting in widespread human, infrastructure, economic or environmental damages beyond the handling ability and resource capacity of the affected area [1].For example, the 2010 Yushu earthquake in China hit more than 20,000 square kilometers, and infrastructure systems, such as education, health, electricity, communication, highway, and water conservancy, were severely damaged
This section aims to test the effect of different deprivation cost functions on the optimal emergency logistics system design
The average case in the above section is used as the benchmark, where the traditional deprivation cost function, i.e., the form of exponential growth and linear hysteretic effect, is incorporated in the modeling structure
Summary
Catastrophic disasters usually bring tremendous damages to the functioning of a community or society, resulting in widespread human, infrastructure, economic or environmental damages beyond the handling ability and resource capacity of the affected area [1]. Extensive research has been carried out on humanitarian logistics It involves a series of key decisions across these three stages; these decisions may affect each other, such as the interaction between the pre-disaster emergency service facility location design and the post-disaster transportation and allocation. The integration of facility location and material prepositioning in the pre-disaster planning phase (i.e., strategic level) and service allocation in the post-disaster period (i.e., operational level) was realized in a scenario-based stochastic program The model determines the optimal prepositioning locations and the amount of the preset materials in each facility; while in each scenario, the service allocation will be realized based on the considerations of both transportation cost and deprivation cost. Section draws some conclusions and briefly goes into future research directions
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