Disaster preparedness in humanitarian logistics:A collaborative approach for resource management in floods

Abstract

The logistical deployment of resources to provide relief to disaster victims and the appropriate planning of these activities are critical to reduce the suffering caused. Disaster management attracts many organisations working alongside each other and sharing resources to cope with an emergency. Consequently, successful operations rely heavily on the collaboration of different organisations. Despite this, there is little research considering the appropriate management of resources from multiple organisations, and none optimising the number of actors required to avoid shortages or convergence. This research introduces a disaster preparedness system based on a combination of multi-objective optimisation and geographical information systems to aid multi-organisational decision-making. A cartographic model is used to avoid the selection of floodable facilities, informing a bi-objective optimisation model used to determine the location of emergency facilities, stock prepositioning, resource allocation and relief distribution, along with the number of actors required to perform these activities. The real conditions of the flood of 2013 in Acapulco, Mexico, provided evidence of the inability of any single organisation to cope with the situation independently. Moreover, data collected showed the unavailability of enough resources to manage a disaster of that magnitude at the time. The results highlighted that the number of government organisations deployed to handle the situation was excessive, leading to high cost without achieving the best possible level of satisfaction. The system proposed showed the potential to achieve better performance in terms of cost and level of service than the approach currently employed by the authorities.

Publication DOI: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ejor.2017.01.021
Divisions: College of Business and Social Sciences > Aston Business School
College of Business and Social Sciences > Aston Business School > Operations & Information Management
Additional Information: © 2017, Elsevier. Licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/
Uncontrolled Keywords: humanitarian logistics,multiple objective programming,disaster preparedness,OR in disaster relief
Publication ISSN: 1872-6860
Last Modified: 04 Dec 2024 08:09
Date Deposited: 24 Jan 2017 08:14
Full Text Link:
Related URLs: https://www.sci ... 0565?via%3Dihub (Publisher URL)
PURE Output Type: Article
Published Date: 2018-02-01
Published Online Date: 2017-01-14
Accepted Date: 2017-01-10
Submitted Date: 2015-12-30
Authors: Rodríguez-espíndola, Oscar (ORCID Profile 0000-0002-4889-1565)
Albores, Pavel (ORCID Profile 0000-0001-7509-9381)
Brewster, Christopher

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