Humanitarian relief supplies distribution: an application of inventory routing problem

Abstract

In this paper, we study the distribution of humanitarian relief supplies. In humanitarian relief, supplies including food, water and medication are received in batches/waves from the suppliers and the donors. Then, these supplies are distributed to local dispensing sites located in the affected areas. Fast and fair distribution of these relief supplies is the key to the success of humanitarian relief operations. Motivated by the practices in humanitarian relief chain, we study an application of Inventory Routing Problem where the goal is equitable distribution of these supplies to the affected areas over a planning horizon. We measure the fairness of the distribution plan by the safety stock level at a demand location, and our goal is to maximize the minimum safety stock level at any location. Such a difference in the objective requires a solution approach that is significantly different than the ones proposed in the literature for classical cost-minimization routing problems. In order to address this distribution problem, we propose a three-phase (clustering, routing and improvement) solution approach. Due to nature of the problem, routing and allocation decisions significantly affect each other. The proposed approach (i) considers the interaction between routing and resource allocation decisions in a novel way to produce equitable relief supplies distribution plans, (ii) outperforms the existing algorithms by finding solutions with around 1.4% lower optimality gap on average, (iii) provides solutions with 2.6% optimality gap on average when compared to an upper bound, and (iv) finds a solution in < 5 min.