Elicitation of Preference among Multiple Criteria in Food Distribution by Food Banks

Abstract

The United Nations Sustainable Development Goals provide a road map for countries to achieve peace and prosperity. In this study, we address two of these sustainable development goals: achieving food security and reducing inequalities. Food banks are nonprofit organizations that collect and distribute food donations to food‐insecure populations in their service regions. Food banks consider three criteria while distributing the donated food: equity, effectiveness, and efficiency. The equity criterion aims to distribute food in proportion to the food‐insecure households in a food bank's service area. The effectiveness criterion aims to minimize undistributed food, whereas the efficiency criterion minimizes the total cost of transportation. Models that assume predetermined weights on these criteria may produce inaccurate results as the preference of food banks over these criteria may vary over time, and as a function of supply and demand. In collaboration with our food bank partner in North Carolina, we develop a single‐period, weighted multi‐criteria optimization model that provides the decision‐maker the flexibility to capture their preferences over the three criteria of equity, effectiveness, and efficiency, and explore the resulting trade‐offs. We then introduce a novel algorithm that elicits the inherent preference of a food bank by analyzing its actions within a single‐period. The algorithm does not require direct interaction with the decision‐maker. The non‐interactive nature of this algorithm is especially significant for humanitarian organizations such as food banks which lack the resources to interact with modelers on a regular basis. We perform extensive numerical experiments to validate the efficiency of our algorithm. We illustrate results using historical data from our food bank partner and discuss managerial insights. We explore the implications of different decision‐maker preferences for the criteria on distribution policies.

A systematic literature review of food banks’ supply chain operations with a focus on optimization models

“…Hasnain et al (2021) explored solutions that prioritize effectiveness and equity (besides efficiency), developing a single period, weighted multicriteria optimization model that provides flexibility for decision-makers to capture their preferences over the three criteria of equity, effectiveness and efficiency.…”

Socially relevant and inclusive operations management

“…For example, food bank is one support mechanism. See, for example, Sönmez et al (2016), Hasnain et al (2021), and Manshadi and Rodilitz (2022) for recent studies on food banks and volunteering operations. Apart from this, in the United States, Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) is the largest federal program that supports low-income families for access to healthy food.…”

An alternative vaccine prioritization approach in response to COVID-19 pandemic

“…Humanitarian logistics domain predominantly use equity measure when allocating critical limited resources to large population groups (Hasnain et al. , 2021), but this approach does not reflect the vulnerabilities present within those populations.…”

“…Humanitarian logistics domain predominantly use equity measure when allocating critical limited resources to large population groups (Hasnain et al, 2021), but this approach does not reflect the vulnerabilities present within those populations. Indeed, in a recent systematic review, researchers review more than 300 studies and conclude that vulnerabilities of individuals or populations and appropriate pandemic response efforts for these communities have not been studied in the literature (Sokat and Altay, 2021).…”