Aid Allocation for Camp‐Based and Urban Refugees with Uncertain Demand and Replenishments

Abstract

There are 26 million refugees worldwide seeking safety from persecution, violence, conflict, and human rights violations. Camp‐based refugees are those that seek shelter in refugee camps, whereas urban refugees inhabit nearby, surrounding populations. The systems that supply aid to refugee camps may suffer from ineffective distribution due to challenges in administration, demand uncertainty and volatility in funding. Aid allocation should be carried out in a manner that properly balances the need of ensuring sufficient aid for camp‐based refugees, with the ability to share excess inventory, when available, with urban refugees that at times seek nearby camp‐based aid. We develop an inventory management policy to govern a camp's sharing of aid with urban refugee populations in the midst of uncertainties related to camp‐based and urban demands, and replenishment cycles due to funding issues. We use the policy to construct costs associated with: (i) referring urban populations elsewhere, (ii) depriving camp‐based refugee populations, and (iii) holding excess inventory in the refugee camp system. We then seek to allocate aid in a manner that minimizes the expected overall cost to the system. We propose two approaches to solve the resulting optimization problem, and conduct computational experiments on a real‐world case study as well as on synthetic data. Our results are complemented by an extensive simulation study that reveals broad support for our optimal thresholds and allocations to generalize across varied key parameters and distributions. We conclude by presenting related discussions that reveal key managerial insights into humanitarian aid allocation under uncertainty.

Sustainable innovations for humanitarian operations in refugee camps

“…(2) Operations Costs represent the cost of running a humanitarian operation. Due to limited financial resources and the dependence on donor funding (Shaheen et al, 2022), efficient OM processes are essential to reach as many beneficiaries as possible (Azizi et al, 2021;Chakravarty, 2021;De Vries and Van Wassenhove, 2020). The (3) Environmental Impact focuses on resources of daily camp life and their sustainable usage.…”

“…Due to limited financial resources and the dependence on donor funding (Shaheen et al. , 2022), efficient OM processes are essential to reach as many beneficiaries as possible (Azizi et al. , 2021; Chakravarty, 2021; De Vries and Van Wassenhove, 2020).…”

A machine learning approach to deal with ambiguity in the humanitarian decision‐making

“…This study is motivated by the need for systematical approaches to facilitate linking information management and decision-making processes, which is a primary challenge in humanitarian environments. There exists a rich literature that present analytical models to address a variety of humanitarian decision-making problems arising in different settings, including transportation planning and fleet management (e.g., Gralla et al, 2016;McCoy & Lee, 2014), inventory and distribution planning (e.g., Azizi et al, 2021;Gallien et al, 2021), prepositioning and network design (e.g., Balcik et al, 2019;Dufour et al, 2018), and postdisaster debris operations (e.g., Lorca et al, 2017). As described by Gralla et al (2016), humanitarian logisticians must make decisions quickly in emergency situations by using incomplete and large amount of information coming from different sources.…”

Humanitarian Operations and the UN Sustainable Development Goals

“…The papers in the current special issue shed light on some of these topics; for example, Arora et al (2021) study the implementation of a voucher system, Sodhi and Knuckles (2021) investigate the role of donors in development aid supply chains, Blair et al (2021) refer to methodological ways of dealing with lack of data, Azizi et al (2021) focus on refugees who left their homes after a complex disaster, and Kougkoulos et al ( 2021) on slavery. At the same time, the broader perspective of the current special issue offered the opportunity to specifically link humanitarian operations to the SDGs and encourage the development of a new field of research.…”

“…This clearly illustrates the systemic nature of these complex problems again. Azizi et al (2021) also feel that the relevance of their work of informing aid distribution among refugee camps is only more accentuated in the post-COVID era. Independent of the effects of the pandemic, allocating medical aid supplies to both camp-based and urban refugees is important.…”