Agent-based model for material convergence in humanitarian logistics

Abstract

Humanitarian logistics has taken a big boost as a study area because of the increased frequency of natural disasters worldwide. Within this area, there is a particular issue that has received little attention in the literature, regarding the aid received in the aftermath of a disaster. This problem may occur as an oversupply of goods, the arrival of unneeded products, or the supply of expired goods. The lack of coordination between the actors involved in relief operations can be conceived as one of the leading causes of this problem, which is called material convergence. This paper focuses on the material convergence problem, to humanitarian logistics introducing a computational theoretical approach to this problem using agent-based modeling where flows, actors and their relationships are characterized by measuring the impact on the logistics performance of the response system. Followed by the simulation, an experimental analysis of the results is performed with three different system configurations. Finally, a scenario is proposed that facilitates coordination between actors where logistics performance indicators show better results regarding response speed and coverage.