Development of a shipment policy for collection centers

Mora-Ochomogo, Irais and Serrato, Marco and Mora-Vargas, Jaime and Akhavan-Tabatabaei, Raha (2021) Development of a shipment policy for collection centers. Mathematics, 9 (12). ISSN 2227-7390

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Abstract

Natural disasters represent a latent threat for every country in the world. Due to climate change and other factors, statistics show that they continue to be on the rise. This situation presents a challenge for the communities and the humanitarian organizations to be better prepared and react faster to natural disasters. In some countries, in-kind donations represent a high percentage of the supply for the operations, which presents additional challenges. This research proposes a Markov Decision Process (MDP) model to resemble operations in collection centers, where in-kind donations are received, sorted, packed, and sent to the affected areas. The decision addressed is when to send a shipment considering the uncertainty of the donations’ supply and the demand, as well as the logistics costs and the penalty of unsatisfied demand. As a result of the MDP a Monotone Optimal Non-Decreasing Policy (MONDP) is proposed, which provides valuable insights for decision-makers within this field. Moreover, the necessary conditions to prove the existence of such MONDP are presented
Item Type: Article
Uncontrolled Keywords: disaster relief; humanitarian logistics; collection centers; donations management; Markov decision process
Subjects: Q Science > QA Mathematics > QA273-280 Probabilities. Mathematical statistics
Divisions: Sabancı Business School
Sabancı Business School > Operations Management and Information Systems
Depositing User: Raha Akhavan
Date Deposited: 21 Aug 2021 15:38
Last Modified: 04 Sep 2022 13:24
URI: https://research.sabanciuniv.edu/id/eprint/41742

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