Abstract
Pre-positioning emergency inventory in selected facilities is commonly adopted to prepare for potential disaster threat. In this study, we simultaneously optimize the decisions of facility location, emergency inventory pre-positioning, and relief delivery operations within a single-commodity disaster relief network. A min-max robust model is proposed to capture the uncertainties in both the left- and right-hand-side parameters in the constraints. The former corresponds to the proportions of the pre-positioned inventories usable after a disaster attack, while the latter represents the demands of the inventories and the road capacities in the disaster-affected areas. We study how to solve the robust model efficiently and analyze a special case that minimizes the deprivation cost. The application of the model is illustrated by a case study of the 2010 earthquake attack at Yushu County in Qinghai Province of PR China. The advantage of the min-max robust model is demonstrated through comparison with the deterministic model and the two-stage stochastic model for the same problem. Experiment variants also show that the robust model outperforms the other two approaches for instances with significantly larger scales.
Original language | English |
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Pages (from-to) | 160-183 |
Number of pages | 24 |
Journal | Production and Operations Management |
Volume | 27 |
Issue number | 1 |
DOIs | |
Publication status | Published - 1 Jan 2018 |
Keywords
- disaster relief
- facility location
- inventory pre-positioning
- min-max robust optimization
- network flow
ASJC Scopus subject areas
- Management Science and Operations Research
- Industrial and Manufacturing Engineering
- Management of Technology and Innovation