Relief Supply Control Model for Prolonged Natural Disasters with Uncertain Demand

Abstract

The fulfillment of relief goods for disaster victims during the emergency response is one of the most important issues to be solved in the humanitarian logistics world. However, some disaster events facing emergency response time in years, such as prolonged volcano eruption. It makes the victims will stay at the evacuation post in an indeterminate time with the uncertain relief goods demand. This condition makes the related government has to prepare the logistics in years. This paper will describe and formulate such a problem in the stochastic inventory control model for a multiple-item single-location inventory system and will be optimized using Sample Average Approximation and Monte Carlo simulation as the method. We will demonstrate using the case of simultaneous eruption disaster in Mt. Sinabung. The numerical result shows that the proposed model can produce a cost reduction and the inventory service level will reach more than 99%, wherein the reality, the service level is always less than 95%.