The Nutritious Supply Chain: Optimizing Humanitarian Food Assistance

The World Food Programme (WFP) is the largest humanitarian agency fighting hunger worldwide, reaching approximately 90 million people with food assistance across 80 countries each year. To deal operational complexities inherent in its mandate, WFP has been developing tools to assist decision makers integrating supply chain decisions departments and functional areas. This paper describes a mixed integer linear programming model that simultaneously optimizes basket be delivered, sourcing plan, delivery transfer modality of long-term recovery operation for month predefined time horizon. By connecting traditional elements nutritional objectives, we are able make significant breakthroughs excellence WFP’s most complex operations. We show three examples how optimization used support operations: (1) reduce costs Iraq by 12% without compromising value supplied, (2) manage scaling-up Yemen from six beneficiaries, (3) identify strategies during El Niño drought 2016.