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Meeting ID: 940 0367 9744  
Passcode: 200534

Disaster preparedness efforts are becoming much more crucial than ever before. After disasters and catastrophic events, resources are mostly or entirely destroyed in the affected area, and local supplies may not be available, posing unique challenges to distributing relief. As a result, the logistics is bound to fail, causing desperation among the population in need. The negative impacts caused by the relief distribution are considered economic externalities. A way to measure these economic externalities is through a concept known as the deprivation cost. The deprivation cost is the cost experienced by the impacted individual for the time spent without the relief. Estimating these deprivation costs and incorporating them into the supply chain and logistics models is challenging but the most appropriate path to follow. The experiences from past disasters offer numerous examples of how the logistics failed, and most of them involved decisions that did not consider the needs of the population.     

This seminar presents the research developed in the disaster response logistics field to minimize the social costs of human suffering. The work developed in Facility Location provides an example of obtaining socially optimal solutions to the disaster response logistic models. In the facility location problem, disaster relief organizations aim for optimal points of distribution (PODs) to distribute the relief supplies to the people in need after a disaster occurs. Given a fixed distribution center where relief supplies are stored, the problem considers identifying the districts’ shapes and the location of the PODs inside the district, such that it minimizes the total social costs. The social costs consider the private or logistics costs (i.e., the fixed cost of setting the POD, the transportation, and inventory holding costs) and the externalities of the distribution in the form of deprivation costs. The analytical and numerical results provide unique insights that can be used by disaster responders at the planning stage to allocate resources better and provide alternative distribution strategies of relief in the affected regions. These findings serve as guidelines for POD planning and disaster preparedness efforts for the distribution of relief.