Browsing by Author "Karaca, Meserret"

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    Master ThesisPublicationMetadata only
    Coordinated inventory planning for humanitarian relief agencies
    (2016-07) Karaca, Meserret; Özener, Okan Örsan; Koyuncu, Burcu Balçık; Özener, Okan Örsan; Koyuncu, Burcu Balçık; Özen, Ulaş; Ekici, Ali; Duran, S.; Department of Industrial Engineering; Karaca, Meserret
    Pre-positioning relief supplies in strategic locations around the world is essential for effective disaster response, especially during the critical 72 hours immediately following the disaster. Most of the existing studies that use quantitative models to determine pre-positioning decisions focus on a single relief agency and assume that the agency makes stock pre-positioning decisions independently of other agencies; that is, the possibility of sharing inventory among different agencies is not considered. In this study, we aim to investigate the potential benefits of making stock pre-positioning decisions collaboratively among multiple agencies. In particular, we consider two agencies that stock relief supplies in a joint depot owned and operated by a separate coordinator (such as the United Nations Humanitarian Response Depot). We assume that these agencies have several operating regions throughout the world. Each operating region may be served by a single agency or by several different agencies depending on its location. Once a disaster occurs in an agency's operating region, the agency aims to satisfy demand as much as possible. Also, other agencies may share their excess inventory with the responding agency. The amount of supplies that can be sent to the disaster region is affected by the uncertain post-disaster funding level of the responding agency. We consider a finite set of scenarios to characterize the uncertainties in disaster locations, impacts and post-disaster funding levels and develop a two-stage stochastic programming model to determine the amount of inventory to be pre-positioned at the joint depot by each agency. We perform a numerical analysis to establish when collaborative action would be beneficial for different types of agencies in different settings.