Browsing by Author "Smilowitz, K."

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Contributions to humanitarian and non-profit operations: Equity impacts on modeling and solution approaches
(Springer, 2019-09-14) Koyuncu, Burcu Balçık; Smilowitz, K.; Industrial Engineering; KOYUNCU, Burcu Balçık
Equity has been acknowledged as an important concern in designing and managing humanitarian and non-profit operations over the past decade. Given the significant demands for relief supplies created by a disaster and the scarcity of resources (such as supplies, vehicles, equipment), it is inevitable that some needs will be satisfied later than others, and effective prioritization is crucial. Relief organizations are faced with the challenge of finding ways to deliver resources in an equitable way to increase the chances of survival of people. These issues also emerge in the operations of non-profit organizations that allocate distribute scarce resources. Important contributions have been made by women in studying equity in humanitarian and non-profit operations, both in terms of practical insights and methodological advances. In this chapter, we review key papers written by women, which have advanced the literature in characterizing equity in humanitarian and non-profit operations and exploring the methodological implications of equity.
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Multi-vehicle sequential resource allocation for a nonprofit distribution system
(Informa Group, 2014) Koyuncu, Burcu Balçık; Iravanib, S.; Smilowitz, K.; Industrial Engineering; KOYUNCU, Burcu Balçık
This article introduces a multi-vehicle sequential allocation problem that considers two critical objectives for nonprofit operations: providing equitable service and minimizing unused donations. This problem is motivated by an application in food redistribution from donors such as restaurants and grocery stores to agencies such as soup kitchens and homeless shelters. A set partitioning model is formulated that can be used to design vehicle routes; it primarily focuses on equity maximization and implicitly considers waste. The behavior of the model in clustering agencies and donors on routes is studied, and the impacts of demand variability and supply availability on route composition and solution performance are analyzed. A comprehensive numerical study is performed in order to develop insights on optimal solutions. Based on this study, an efficient decomposition-based heuristic for the problem that can handle an additional constraint on route length is developed and it is shown that the heuristic obtains high-quality solutions in terms of equity and waste.