A Stochastic Humanitarian Inventory Control Model for Disaster Planning

The impacts of disasters have been recently attracting increasing attention of researchers and policy makers. Nevertheless, there has been little consensus about how an efficient inventory management model can be developed for post-disaster conditions. Victims of a disaster are generally gathered into shelters during and after a severe disaster to ensure their security. Many of these evacuees do not have financial resources to leave the disaster area and to find food, drugs, or other necessities to survive. Hence, their vital needs should be supplied efficiently throughout the entire disaster and post-disaster periods. Without an adequate stock of goods, satisfying daily requirements of the disaster victims without disruptions might be problematic. To solve this problem, humanitarian inventory control models, which can provide adequate response to a disaster and/or humanitarian crisis, are needed. and distribution " (8). This paper is thus concerned with the development of a sub-problem of the general humanitarian supply-chain problem, namely, an efficient and quick-response humanitarian inventory management model which can determine the safety stock that will prevent disruptions at a minimal cost. We first mathematically formulate the humanitarian inventory management problem as a version of Hungarian Inventory Control Model. We, then, propose a solution to this time-dependent stochastic model using pLEPs algorithm. We conclude the paper by giving the single commodity case results and conducting a sensitivity analysis of our model vis-à-vis various model parameters that affect safe inventory levels. INTRODUCTION Natural disasters frequently happen in various parts of the world. For example, the Gulf States in the USA are extremely vulnerable to hurricanes such as the infamous Hurricane Katrina. Moreover, some countries like Turkey or Indonesia, experience severe earthquakes that can kill many people and seriously disrupt daily lives of people. In other places, there may be floods, wild fires, or other disasters that might require evacuation of people either before and/or after the specific disaster occurs. The important point is that they make all of us acutely aware of our vulnerabilities to disasters. Therefore, we are mostly concerned with the effects of these disasters on the survivors. Can sick or hurt people have a chance to receive the medical care and supplies they need? Can people find enough food and adequate shelter so that they can survive for a relatively extended period of time after the disaster? With these important questions in mind, this study is concerned with the development of a realistic inventory management …