Pre-Positioning Facility Location and Resource Allocation in Humanitarian Relief Operations Considering Deprivation Costs
Sustainability
; 13(8):4141, 2021.
Article
in English
| ProQuest Central | ID: covidwho-1362546
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.
Full text:
Available
Collection:
Databases of international organizations
Database:
ProQuest Central
Language:
English
Journal:
Sustainability
Year:
2021
Document Type:
Article
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