scholarly journals Robust Design of Relief Distribution Networks Considering Uncertainty

2021 ◽  
Vol 13 (16) ◽  
pp. 9281
Author(s):  
Moddassir Khan Nayeem ◽  
Gyu M. Lee

In the post-disaster response phase, an efficient relief distribution strategy plays a vital role in alleviating suffering in disaster-stricken areas, which sometimes becomes challenging in humanitarian logistics. Most governments pre-located the relief goods at the pre-determined warehouses against possible disasters. Those goods must be shipped to the relief distribution centers (RDCs) to be further distributed to the victims in impacted areas upon the disasters. Secondary disasters can occur due to the first disaster and can occur relatively close in time and location, resulting in more suffering and making the relief distribution activities more challenging. The needs of additional RDCs must be determined as well in response to the secondary disasters. A robust optimization model is proposed to hedge against uncertainties in RDCs’ capacity and relief demand. Its objective is to minimize the sum of transportation cost, additional RDC cost, and shortage of commodities. The computational results are given to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed model. The sensitivity analysis gives an insight to the decision-makers.

Author(s):  
Rajali Maharjan ◽  
Shinya Hanaoka

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to reveal the importance of the order of establishment of temporary logistics hubs (TLHs) when resources (mobile storage units used as TLHs) are limited and to present the development and implementation of a methodology that determines the order of establishment of TLHs to support post-disaster decision making. Design/methodology/approach It employed a decision support system that considers multiple decision makers and subjective attributes, while also addressing the impreciseness inherent in post-disaster decision making for ordering the establishment of TLHs. To do so, an optimization model was combined with a fuzzy multi-attribute group decision making approach. A numerical illustration was performed using data from the April 2015 Nepal Earthquake. Findings The results showed the location and order of establishment of TLHs, and demonstrated the impact of decision makers’ opinions on the overall ordering. Research limitations/implications The study does not discuss the uncertain nature of the location problem and the potential need for relocation of TLHs. Practical implications This methodology offers managerial insights for post-disaster decision making when resources are limited and their effective utilization is vital. The results highlight the importance of considering the opinions of multiple actors/decision makers to enable coordination and avoid complication between the growing numbers of humanitarian responders during disaster response. Originality/value This study introduces the concept of the order of establishment of TLHs and demonstrates its importance when resources are limited. It develops and implements a methodology determining the order of establishment of TLHs to support post-disaster decision making.


2020 ◽  
Vol 12 (19) ◽  
pp. 8262
Author(s):  
Yen-Yu Chiu ◽  
Hiroshi Omura ◽  
Hung-En Chen ◽  
Su-Chin Chen

Search and rescue (SAR) is often the focus during the post-disaster response phase. It is operated under the principle of the “golden 72 h”; however, the actual efficiency of each operation lacks a standard for review. On the basis of continuously updated death toll data during the SAR cases of 51 earthquakes and 10 rainfall-induced disasters, this study developed indicators corresponding to various death tolls for reviewing the time costs and the progress of different stages of SAR. Through analysis of the established indicators, the results showed that said indicators are capable of evaluating the efficiency of SAR. These indicators also revealed that earthquake cases, with or without serious secondary disasters (e.g., tsunamis), significantly affected SAR efficiency. The regression results showed that the SAR efficiency of rainfall-induced disasters is much lower than that of earthquake disasters. Additionally, it was shown that the first casualty reports are typically late and that SAR works last a long time, highlighting the difficulty and possible delay of SAR works during rainfall-induced disasters. Previous studies and analyses might have been able to make subjective descriptions of each SAR operation; however, this study quantitatively indicates the difference between actual and expected efficiency under specific death tolls.


Author(s):  
Rajali Maharjan ◽  
Shinya Hanaoka

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to develop a mathematical model that determines the location of temporary logistics hubs (TLHs) for disaster response and proposes a new method to determine weights of the objectives in a multi-objective optimization problem. The research is motivated by the importance of TLHs and the complexity that surrounds the determination of their location. Design/methodology/approach A multi-period multi-objective model with multi-sourcing is developed to determine the location of the TLHs. A fuzzy factor rating system (FFRS) under the group decision-making (GDM) condition is then proposed to determine the weights of the objectives when multiple decision makers exist. Findings The interview with decision makers shows the heterogeneity of decision opinions, thus substantiating the importance of GDM. The optimization results provide useful managerial insights for decision makers by considering the trade-off between two non-commensurable objectives. Research limitations/implications In this study, decision makers are considered to be homogeneous, which might not be the case in reality. This study does not consider the stochastic nature of relief demand. Practical implications The outcomes of this study are valuable to decision makers for relief distribution planning. The proposed FFRS approach reveals the importance of involving multiple decision makers to enhance sense of ownership of established TLHs. Originality/value A mathematical model highlighting the importance of multi-sourcing and short operational horizon of TLHs is developed. A new method is proposed and implemented to determine the weights of the objectives. To the best of the authors’ knowledge, the multi-actor and multi-objective aspects of the TLH location problem have not thus far been considered simultaneously for one particular problem in humanitarian logistics.


Author(s):  
Ali Asghar and Dr. Bhoomi Gupta T

Food Distribution Application For Disaster Response is one of the innovative and contemporary topic in these days that consider to be esteemed idea. This project is based on the distribution of food items to the needy ones who struck at disaster prone area with the help of drone (Unmanned Aerial Vehicle).This drone is handled by remote control by a human operator. It can be operated remotely in real-time or pre-programmed to fly independently on the pre-defined routes. This drone has Bluetooth in-built through which it can be connected with people who afflicted in a disaster prone area. Drone has camera in-built through which it captures the picture of calamity area. This application has the functionality that it alarms the nearby people or government relief workers so that people may vacate from the catastrophic area. This paper presents a systematic review of contributions on relief distribution networks in response to disaster.


2020 ◽  
Vol 39 (3) ◽  
pp. 4041-4058
Author(s):  
Fang Liu ◽  
Xu Tan ◽  
Hui Yang ◽  
Hui Zhao

Intuitionistic fuzzy preference relations (IFPRs) have the natural ability to reflect the positive, the negative and the non-determinative judgements of decision makers. A decision making model is proposed by considering the inherent property of IFPRs in this study, where the main novelty comes with the introduction of the concept of additive approximate consistency. First, the consistency definitions of IFPRs are reviewed and the underlying ideas are analyzed. Second, by considering the allocation of the non-determinacy degree of decision makers’ opinions, the novel concept of approximate consistency for IFPRs is proposed. Then the additive approximate consistency of IFPRs is defined and the properties are studied. Third, the priorities of alternatives are derived from IFPRs with additive approximate consistency by considering the effects of the permutations of alternatives and the allocation of the non-determinacy degree. The rankings of alternatives based on real, interval and intuitionistic fuzzy weights are investigated, respectively. Finally, some comparisons are reported by carrying out numerical examples to show the novelty and advantage of the proposed model. It is found that the proposed model can offer various decision schemes due to the allocation of the non-determinacy degree of IFPRs.


2020 ◽  
Vol 7 (04) ◽  
Author(s):  
PRADEEP H K ◽  
JASMA BALASANGAMESHWARA ◽  
K RAJAN ◽  
PRABHUDEV JAGADEESH

Irrigation automation plays a vital role in agricultural water management system. An efficient automatic irrigation system is crucial to improve crop water productivity. Soil moisture based irrigation is an economical and efficient approach for automation of irrigation system. An experiment was conducted for irrigation automation based on the soil moisture content and crop growth stage. The experimental findings exhibited that, automatic irrigation system based on the proposed model triggers the water supply accurately based on the real-time soil moisture values.


Symmetry ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 13 (5) ◽  
pp. 839
Author(s):  
Tabasam Rashid ◽  
Asif Ali ◽  
Juan Guirao ◽  
Adrián Valverde

The generalized interval-valued trapezoidal fuzzy best-worst method (GITrF-BWM) provides more reliable and more consistent criteria weights for multiple criteria group decision making (MCGDM) problems. In this study, GITrF-BWM is integrated with the extended TOPSIS (technique for order preference by similarity to the ideal solution) and extended VIKOR (visekriterijumska optimizacija i kompromisno resenje) methods for the selection of the optimal industrial robot using fuzzy information. For a criteria-based selection process, assigning weights play a vital role and significantly affect the decision. Assigning weights based on direct opinions of decision makers can be biased, so weight deriving models, such as GITrF-BWM, overcome this discrepancy. In previous studies, generalized interval-valued trapezoidal fuzzy weights were not derived by using any MCGDM method for the robot selection process. For this study, both subjective and objective criteria are considered. The preferences of decision makers are provided with the help of linguistic terms that are then converted into fuzzy information. The stability and reliability of the methods were tested by performing sensitivity analysis, which showed that the ranking results of both the methodologies are not symmetrical, and the integration of GITrF-BWM with the extended TOPSIS method provides stable and reliable results as compared to the integration of GITrF-BWM with the extended VIKOR method. Hence, the proposed methodology provides robust optimal industrial robot selection.


2021 ◽  
Vol 11 (4) ◽  
pp. 1946
Author(s):  
Linh Thi Truc Doan ◽  
Yousef Amer ◽  
Sang-Heon Lee ◽  
Phan Nguyen Ky Phuc ◽  
Tham Thi Tran

Minimizing the impact of electronic waste (e-waste) on the environment through designing an effective reverse supply chain (RSC) is attracting the attention of both industry and academia. To obtain this goal, this study strives to develop an e-waste RSC model where the input parameters are fuzzy and risk factors are considered. The problem is then solved through crisp transformation and decision-makers are given the right to choose solutions based on their satisfaction. The result shows that the proposed model provides a practical and satisfactory solution to compromise between the level of satisfaction of constraints and the objective value. This solution includes strategic and operational decisions such as the optimal locations of facilities (i.e., disassembly, repairing, recycling facilities) and the flow quantities in the RSC.


2017 ◽  
Vol 2017 ◽  
pp. 1-10 ◽  
Author(s):  
Junkang He ◽  
Chenpeng Feng ◽  
Dan Hu ◽  
Liang Liang

China is one of the disaster-prone countries in the world. Constructing a rapid and effective relief logistic system is important for disaster-responding at country level. Strategic prepositioning of emergency items, especially the decision of appropriate emergency warehouses location, has significant impacts on rapid disaster response to ensure sufficient relief supplies. The emergency warehouse location decision is a complex problem, where a wide variety of criteria need to be considered and the preference information of decision makers (DMs) may be imprecise or even absent. In this paper, we identify key effectiveness-oriented criteria used to evaluate the alternative emergency warehouse locations and make an attempt to propose a new multicriteria ranking method to solve the problem of inaccurate or uncertain weight information based on stochastic pairwise dominant relations and the pruning procedure of ELECTRE-II method. The proposed method extends the conventional ELECTRE-II method by incorporating inaccurate information and broadens its application to emergency warehouse location field. The feasibility and applicability of the proposed method are illustrated with a simulated example.


2021 ◽  
Vol ahead-of-print (ahead-of-print) ◽  
Author(s):  
Mohammad Ali Beheshtinia ◽  
Narjes Salmabadi ◽  
Somaye Rahimi

Purpose This paper aims to provide an integrated production-routing model in a three-echelon supply chain containing a two-layer transportation system to minimize the total costs of production, transportation, inventory holding and expired drugs treatment. In the proposed problem, some specifications such as multisite manufacturing, simultaneous pickup and delivery and uncertainty in parameters are considered. Design/methodology/approach At first, a mathematical model has been proposed for the problem. Then, one possibilistic model and one robust possibilistic model equivalent to the initial model are provided regarding the uncertain nature of the model parameters and the inaccessibility of their probability function. Finally, the performance of the proposed model is evaluated using the real data collected from a pharmaceutical production center in Iran. The results reveal the proper performance of the proposed models. Findings The results obtained from applying the proposed model to a real-life production center indicated that the number of expired drugs has decreased because of using this model, also the costs of the system were reduced owing to integrating simultaneous drug pickup and delivery operations. Moreover, regarding the results of simulations, the robust possibilistic model had the best performance among the proposed models. Originality/value This research considers a two-layer vehicle routing in a production-routing problem with inventory planning. Moreover, multisite manufacturing, simultaneous pickup of the expired drugs and delivery of the drugs to the distribution centers are considered. Providing a robust possibilistic model for tackling the uncertainty in demand, costs, production capacity and drug expiration costs is considered as another remarkable feature of the proposed model.


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