Pre-positioning of relief items under road/facility vulnerability with concurrent restoration and relief transportation

Abstract

Planning for response to sudden-onset disasters such as earthquakes, hurricanes, or floods needs to take into account the inherent uncertainties regarding the disaster and its impacts on the affected people as well as the logistics network. This article focuses on the design of a multi-echelon humanitarian response network, where the pre-disaster decisions of warehouse location and item pre-positioning are subject to uncertainties in relief item demand and vulnerability of roads and facilities following the disaster. Once the disaster strikes, relief transportation is accompanied by simultaneous repair of blocked roads, which delays the transportation process, but gradually increases the connectivity of the network at the same time. A two-stage stochastic program is formulated to model this system and a Sample Average Approximation (SAA) scheme is proposed for its heuristic solution. To enhance the efficiency of the SAA algorithm, we introduce a number of valid inequalities and bounds on the objective value. Computational experiments on a potential earthquake scenario in Istanbul, Turkey show that the SAA scheme is able to provide an accurate approximation of the objective function in reasonable time, and can help drive policy-based implications that may be applicable in preparation for similar potential disasters.

Keywords:

• Disaster preparedness
• inventory pre-positioning
• relief transportation
• network restoration
• stochastic programming
• sample average approximation

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Melih Çelik

Ece Aslan received her B.S. and M.S. degrees in industrial engineering from Middle East Technical University (Ankara, Turkey) in 2011 and 2016, respectively. Her research interests include stochastic models, humanitarian logistics and supply chain management. She has 7 years of professional job experience in procurement and supply chain management in FMCG, energy, consumer durable goods and aerospace industries.

Melih Çelik is a senior lecturer (associate professor) in the School of Management at the University of Bath, United Kingdom. He holds B.S. and M.S. degrees in industrial engineering from the Middle East Technical University, as well as an M.S. degree in operations research and Ph.D. in industrial engineering from the Georgia Institute of Technology (Atlanta, USA). Prior to his current position, he served as an assistant professor in the Department of Industrial Engineering at Middle East Technical University. His research interests cover design and management of large-scale resilient supply chain/logistics network, as well as applications of optimization models in humanitarian and public non-profit supply chains, warehouse logistics, and location and layout of facilities.