Pre-Positioning Relief Supplies and Supplier Selection Strategy in Disaster Relief
Date
2019-12
Authors
Olanrewaju, Oluwasegun G.
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Abstract
<p>Natural disasters have a life changing impact on individuals, the effect can be felt
at various levels and can even affect an entire country. In the United States, major disasters
have seriously affected the country’s economy and the people. It has been also challenging
the country’s emergency response capacity. In order to reduce the damage caused by
disasters, there is a need for the proper planning and efficient management of emergency
supplies in place before the onset of a disaster. </p>
<p>This research focuses on the preparedness stage of disaster operations management,
precisely on how the relief organization can best satisfy demand at minimum costs and risk.
Currently in the United States, the system in place plans for the procurement of emergency
supplies which are stored in a warehouse. However, the major challenge faced by relief
organizations (e.g. Federal Emergency Management Agency) is the timely delivery of the
relief items at a reasonable cost, while dealing with uncertainties of disasters.</p>
<p>This research addresses the problems encountered by the relief organization by
concentrating on two aspects. Firstly, the commodity lifetime period is considered with the
related costs associated with the storage and removal (when it is close to expiration) of
relief items. This study provides relief agencies managerial insights about dynamic control
of inventory over each scenario and dealing with relief supplies which will expire.
Secondly, the decision on supplier selection is integrated into the pre-positioning stage for
the efficient management of the relief supplies and timely distribution of the supplies to
the disaster victims. Agreement terms such as the commitment quantity of the relief organization, the reserve capacity of the suppliers, and the quantity discount rate are
considered. This study gives the relief agencies insights on how the agreement terms affect
the supplier selection decision, and how the total expected costs of having an agreement in
place and procuring relief items from the suppliers can be minimized. Compared to the
traditional two-stage stochastic programming approach, which is commonly used in the
field of humanitarian relief, a multi-stage stochastic programming model is presented in
each part because of the stochastic nature of the proposed problems, and the need to make
sequential decisions over time.</p>
<p> In this research, a real-world setting which considers disasters such as earthquakes,
floods and hurricanes in the mainland of the United States is used as a case study. The
sensitivities of the models for variation of parameters are also studied. The first part of
this research provides insight on how costs can be minimized when the relief organization
finds a better way of disposing relief items close to expiration. The second part provides
relief organization insights on how the costs involved in the supplier selection can be
managed and the type of suppliers to be in agreement with.</p>
Description
Keywords
Humanitarian relief, Stochastic programming, Pre-positioning of relief supplies, Supplier selection
Citation
Olanrewaju, O. G. (2019). <i>Pre-positioning relief supplies and supplier selection strategy in disaster relief</i> (Unpublished thesis). Texas State University, San Marcos, Texas.