EURO 2025 Leeds
Abstract Submission

188. Relief supply prepositioning strategies via option contract reserve fleet vehicles

Invited abstract in session WC-55: Strategic Facility Location and Inventory Prepositioning, stream Humanitarian Operations.

Wednesday, 12:30-14:00
Room: Liberty 1.09

Authors (first author is the speaker)

1. Ziyou Wu

Abstract

In preparing for disasters, relief supplies can be prepositioned as tangible forms in warehouses or as intangible forms, such as production capacity. However, prepositioning relief supplies in the absence of sufficient vehicles may delay delivery time and reduce relief operation performance. Given that the budget pressure prevents the local authorities for disaster relief from keeping a large fleet in stock, they choose reserve fleet vehicles via option contract as an alternative. We propose a model to coordinate prepositioned tangible and intangible relief supplies considering fleet vehicles reserve via option contract. The objective function includes deprivation cost, which considers relief beneficiary suffering. We first obtained the optimal quantities of prepositioned tangible and intangible supplies, and then fleet vehicles. Furthermore, we propose benchmark prepositioning relief supply models without reserving fleet vehicles to compare performances among them. We proved that reserving fleet vehicles is effective in reducing operation costs, alleviating relief beneficiary suffering and improving supplier profit. The applicability of the proposed model is examined through numerical examples.

Keywords

Status: accepted


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