Humanitarian supply chain network design using data envelopment analysis and multi-objective programming models

Abstract

Emergency events such as natural disasters or terrorist attacks seem to occur anywhere and tend to increase. This paper studies a humanitarian supply chain network (HTSCN) design problem in a pre-disaster scenario, which consists of finding the optimal emergency response facility (ERF) locations and allocation scheme of humanitarian supplies through ERFs, where all ERFs are under the risk of disruptions. Naturally, this type of design problem should deal with multiple goals. An innovative two-step framework of designing efficient HTSCN by combining multi-objective programming (MOP) models with data envelopment analysis (DEA) is proposed. A case study using the historical data on the disasters in South Carolina, USA is presented to illustrate the effectiveness and efficiency of the proposed combining framework. The case study demonstrates that the proposed procedure would help practitioners and researchers generate a finer evaluation of efficiency and would provide a benchmarking methodology for designing HTSCN system. [Received: 22 October 2017; Revised: 9 April 2018; Revised: 15 October 2018; Revised: 22 December 2018; Accepted: 26 January 2019]