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576. Relief Supply Chain Planning: Fair allocation of in-kind donations in post-disaster phase

Invited abstract in session TC-21: Efficiency, equity and fairness in humanitarian operations, stream OR in Humanitarian Operations (HOpe).

Tuesday, 12:30-14:00
Room: 49 (building: 116)

Authors (first author is the speaker)

1. Zehranaz Donmez
Industrial Engineering, Bilkent University
2. Bahar Yetis Kara
Industrial Engineering, Bilkent University
3. Ozlem Karsu
Industrial Engineering, Bilkent University
4. Francisco Saldanha-da-Gama
Sheffield University Management School

Abstract

In this paper, we study the relief logistics problem that emerges in the response phase after a disaster. We consider a case in which a set of demand nodes must be supplied with some urgent commodity over a planning horizon. The supply for this relief item is irregular and time-dependent and often not enough for the demand since, for instance, it may depend on voluntary donations. As observed in previous disasters, donations lead to a high level of uncertainty in the distribution network as the amount depends on the choice of volunteers. We assume that supply information reveals at the beginning of each period, upon processing the collected in-kind donations. This uncertainty poses a major challenge when it comes to fairly distributing the available amount.
The problem of interest can be cast as a multi-period location-inventory problem and formulated using multi-stage stochastic programming. Unlike most of the existing literature, location decisions take place in each stage of the planning horizon as the information gradually reveals.
The mathematical model is tested using instances built from real data available in the literature, using a set of scenario trees with different supply levels. Computational tests are made on these benchmark instances with various sizes of network and scenario trees.
The results show that the new modeling framework can be extremely useful when it comes to finding fair solutions for supplying a relief item with uncertain availability.

Keywords

Status: accepted

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