Simulation based strategic decision making in humanitarian supply chain management

Abstract

Strategic decision making plays an important role in disaster management. In view of an imminent or already occurring event, e.g. flood, that has the potential to stress and threaten populated regions, humanitarian supply chain management is a place where strategic decision making plays a major role. Sensible or strategic measures have to be developed in order to mitigate damages. Strategic measures should take into account available and possibly distributed resources, e.g. vehicles, storages and street networks, and of course the type of measure against the background of protection goals. Finding good or sensible measures becomes a hard task if the menaced region refers to a densely populated area, where the functionality of street network has a dynamic feature in terms of the emergence of blocked segments. This task gets even harder if the protection of certain critical infrastructures also has to be considered. Our work proposes a framework of a decision support system that is based on the synergetic coupling of a critical infrastructure and a traffic simulation module. By defining different event scenarios, different simulation runs can be triggered beforehand and according to the decision maker's preferences, sensible measures in terms of type of resources and routes are stored and displayed to the decision maker. Especially simultaneously occurring issues of different problem categories requiring decisions by various decision makers are addressed.