EURO 2025 Leeds
Abstract Submission

532. Capacitated Relief Provision Planning for En Route Refugees with Probabilistic Movements

Invited abstract in session TB-55: Robust and Stochastic Models in Disaster Management, stream Humanitarian Operations.

Tuesday, 10:30-12:00
Room: Liberty 1.09

Authors (first author is the speaker)

1. Eda Yücel
Industrial Engineering, TOBB University of Economics and Technology
2. Amirreza Pashapour
IEOM, KOC University
3. Dilek Gunnec
Industrial Engineering, Ozyegin University
4. Sibel Salman
Industrial Engineering, Koc University

Abstract

The number of refugees enduring international displacement has alarmingly doubled over the past decade, reaching nearly 37.9 million individuals by 2024. Massive refugee movements force them into dire living conditions with severe inaccessibility to essential services and resources. Humanitarian organizations are pivotal in alleviating the migration adversities of en route refugees through relief aid provisioning interventions, an area where academic approaches are seldom explored. We aim to address the cost-efficient fulfillment of recurring needs for geographically dispersed refugee groups migrating toward safe destinations. Here, capacitated mobile facilities are tasked with delivering relief aid to refugee groups periodically to ensure equitable service frequency. We introduce this problem as the Capacitated Mobile Facility Location Problem with Uncertain Mobile Demand (CMFLP-UMD). We model CMFLP-UMD as a Markov decision process (MDP) with probabilistic refugee movement behaviors. To solve this problem, we develop an approximate policy iteration algorithm. For decision-makers in relief organizations, we also present a state-dependent variable threshold policy that quickly attains high-quality relief provision plans. Our proposed methods are tested on the recent Syria-Türkiye migration crisis case study instances. The findings reveal the managerial benefits of adopting our approaches and provide guidelines for future refugee migration crises.

Keywords

Status: accepted

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