A monotone optimal policy for collection points in disaster relief operations

© 2016 Proceedings of the 2016 Industrial and Systems Engineering Research Conference, ISERC 2016. All rights reserved.Each year, hurricanes, earthquakes, floods and other natural disasters affect millions of people around the world. For such events, an adequate supply chain management to assist these communities is crucial. Along the supply chain epochs, a proper inventory management is a key activity for an adequate and timely delivery of supplies and donations to those who require them. In Mexico, around 80% of the donations are made in-kind, directly to the collection points that the government or other NGOs such as the Mexican Red Cross enable. The collection points represent that first epoch where the population decides to bring their donations: where these are received, classified, packed and sent to the affected areas. Through this research, an inventory strategy is developed to approach the management of supplies in collection points during disaster relief activities. A Markovian Decision Model has been developed, in order to present the conditions required for the existence of an Optimal Monotone Non-decreasing Policy to define shipment volumes and decision epochs to send the items to the affected areas. The model considers the minimization of the so called social (deprivation) costs, as well as the logistic ones.

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