Robust humanitarian relief logistics network planning

Abstract

In recent years, death toll of natural and man-made disasters has increased at an appalling rate. Thus, disaster management and especially efficient management of humanitarian relief efforts seem to be essential. This paper presents a bi-objective mixed-integer mathematical model for Humanitarian Relief Logistics (HRL) operations planning, as an important part of the humanitarian relief efforts. This model determines optimal policies including location of warehouses, quantity of emergency relief items that should be held at each warehouse, and distribution plan to provide an emergency response pre-positioning strategy for disasters by considering two objectives. The first one minimizes the average response time and the second one minimizes the total operational cost including the fixed cost of establishing warehouses, the holding cost of unused supplies and the penalty cost of unsatisfied demand. The survival of prepositioned supplies, demand amount and routes condition following an event are considered under uncertainty in the model solved by a robust scenario-based approach. The robust approach is applied to reduce the effects of fluctuations of the uncertain parameters with regards to all the possible future scenarios. The research demonstrates the applicability and usefulness of the proposed model on a case study on earthquake preparation in the Seattle area in USA. In addition, the work applies the Reservation Level Tchebycheff Procedure (RLTP) method to solve the bi-objective model in an interactive way with decision maker. This work provides practitioners, specifically planning teams, with a new approach to assist with disaster preparedness and to improve their logistics decisions.

Dynamic vehicle routing problems: Three decades and counting

“…Among other work, Rezaei‐Malek and Tavakkoli‐Moghaddam presented a biobjective mixed‐integer mathematical model for humanitarian relief logistics operations planning. The model determined optimal policies including location of warehouses, quantity of emergency relief items that should be held at each warehouse and distribution plan to provide an emergency response prepositioning strategy for disasters by considering two objectives: minimizing the average response time and minimizing the total operational cost including the fixed cost of establishing warehouses, the holding cost of unused supplies and the penalty cost of unsatisfied demand.…”

Relief commodities distribution planning considering the features of demand areas: a robust multi-objective approach

“…The model showed improvement in quality of solutions when collaboration and cooperation between sub-regions were made. Rezaei-Malek and Tavakkoli-Moghaddam (2014) [19] presented an uncertain model to minimize cost and response time objectives. Their model aimed to distribute relief commodities in the response phase after locating and determining inventories.…”

On the critical success factors for B2B e-marketplace

“…Generally, absence of trust is regarded as impediment for successful execution of B2B EC (Chong et al, 2009). Trust consists of following items: sincerity, qualification, impartial, loyalty, freedom and clear information between commercial partners (Chong & Ooi, 2008;Rezaei-Malek & Tavakkoli-Moghaddam, 2014). There is a higher trust to electronic commerce than traditional commerce; since, online services and products are not approved immediately and there are few rules for preparing EC.…”