Abstract
In the immediate aftermath of any disaster event, operational decisions are made to relieve the affected population and minimize casualties and human suffering. One of the most crucial decisions concerns the delivery of the correct amount of humanitarian aid at the right moment to the right place. This decision should be made considering the dynamism of disaster response operations where information is unknown beforehand and varies over time. For instance, victims’ word of mouth and impatience when facing shortages can make them decide to leave distribution points (DPs), impacting relief distribution operations. Therefore, inventory and transportation decisions should be made continuously to better serve affected people. This work presents a simulation-optimization approach to dynamically studying disaster relief inventory and routing decisions. An agent-based simulation model recreates humanitarian aid distribution operations, including behavioral factors such as victims’ word of mouth and impatience. Additionally, inventory routing schemes are created using a mathematical model. A case study motivated by the 2017 Mocoa landslide in Colombia is developed and presented for use in conjunction with the proposed framework. The key findings of the study reveal the importance of considering changes in demand at DPs that can be caused by victims’ word of mouth and impatience when planning disaster relief distribution operations. Including such factors and making inventory and transportation decisions frequently will improve the service level indicators in humanitarian response operations.
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Data Availability
Data is available upon request to the authors.
Notes
In this paper, we use the term “victims” to refer to people or families who suffered a disaster but managed to survive it and are in a vulnerable condition.
In addition to distributing humanitarian aid to the victims, the DPs in Mocoa offered housing facilities to provide victims with a place to stay (shelters). However, in this research, we consider them to be DPs.
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The authors thank the Faculty of Engineering at Universidad de La Sabana for funding this research project.
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All authors contributed to the study conception and design. Material preparation, data collection and analysis were performed by Julián Alberto Espejo-Díaz. The first draft of the manuscript was written by Julián Alberto Espejo-Díaz and all authors commented on previous versions of the manuscript. Funding acquisition and supervision by William J. Guerrero.
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Espejo-Díaz, J.A., Guerrero, W.J. A multiagent approach to solving the dynamic postdisaster relief distribution problem. Oper Manag Res 14, 177–193 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12063-021-00192-1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12063-021-00192-1