Decision Support Tool for Enhancing Supply Chain Management in Disaster Relief Operations

A United States (US) government agency is charged with delivering US assistance to foreign countries in the aftermath of sudden onset disasters. A major element of this mission is the strategic storage of six critical commodities located at warehouses across the globe. A rapid needs assessment is necessary for determining the commodity types and amounts, which the agency then transports to the disaster location to be distributed to the affected population by partner organizations on the ground. Currently, the entire commodity shipment is sent via a chartered aircraft, obtained through an emergency bid process, to a target airfield for transfer to the distributing organization. Incremental commodity delivery is a potential strategy that would support decision efficiency. Based on the demand on the ground, shipments can be scheduled and sent when they are truly needed, using a variety of transport modes. The agency can reduce financial cost (transportation expenses) and carbon cost (environmental impact) while decreasing port inventory saturation that occurs when the number of commodities delivered exceeds the partner organizations’ distribution capacity. The incremental approach requires complex decision-making to assess available transport options and their financial and carbon efficiencies while meeting target arrival dates/times for each shipment. This project produced a decision support tool that uses historical and GIS data to project sequences of commodity increments and shipment alternatives that meet target arrival times. Users can then conduct informed tradeoff and scenario analyses during their decision process for specific disaster relief operations. The tool presents alternatives based upon four categories of constraints: delivery timing, cost efficiency, carbon efficiency, and the inventory capacity of the arrival port. User inputs include the commodity types and amounts to be delivered, the timeline within which they must arrive, and the target arrival port. The model utilizes multi-objective network optimization to present the potential tradeoffs between the current delivery strategy and the method of incremental shipments timed to meet commodity distribution rates. The tool may identify options that are more functionally and financially beneficial to the agency, its beneficiaries (i.e., more commodities can be provided if transportation costs decrease), and the distributing partners. It can also support an increase in environmentally conscious decisions, which is a growing priority in the humanitarian emergency community. The tool can also be adapted to meet the needs of similar organizations to support their decision-making pertaining to disaster supply chain management.