Proactive and reactive inventory policies in humanitarian operations

Abstract

Inventory planning for the pre- and post-disaster phases of disaster relief lifecycle is a challenging problem associated with the humanitarian relief supply chains. In this work, two mathematical models are presented encompassing the whole disaster relief lifecycle. By accounting for holding costs of perishable supplies, a two-stage stochastic programming model is first developed by which the inventory prepositioning locations, inventory levels, and short-term distribution quantities are determined. For the recovery phase, this research adapts the well-known continuous review (Q, r) inventory model for relief warehouses while accounting for the inherent epistemic uncertainty in the required data by using the fuzzy programming. A case study of Iranian Red Cross is also provided to illustrate the applicability of the first model and to demonstrate how it supports the two first phases of disaster lifecycle. Additionally, a numerical example is presented to demonstrate the applicability of the (Q, r) model for the recovery phase. Lastly, the impact of penalty costs on the solutions is discussed.