Multicriteria Cost Assessment and Logistics Modeling for Military Humanitarian Assistance and Disaster Relief Aerial Delivery Operations

Abstract

Given that it is not always feasible to reach an affected area via land or sea within the first week following a natural disaster, aerial delivery provides the primary means to rapidly supply the affected population. When direct airdrop systems are used to deliver large quantities of individually wrapped food and water items, dispersion among the affected disaster relief population will occur more quickly. In this project, we proffer a multiple criteria decision analysis (MCDA) framework to optimize the military humanitarian assistance/disaster relief (HA/DR) aerial delivery supply chain network. The model uses stochastic, mixed-integer, weighted goal programming to optimize network design, logistics costs, staging locations, procurement amounts, and inventory levels. The MCDA framework enables decision makers to explore the trade-offs between military HA/DR aerial delivery supply chain efficiency and responsiveness while optimizing across a wide range of real-world probabilistic scenarios to account for the inherent uncertainty in the location of global humanitarian disasters as well as the amount of demand to be met.

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Document Details

Document Type
Technical Report
Publication Date
Mar 01, 2015
Accession Number
ADA614339

Entities

People

  • Eric Spero
  • Lawrence Fulton
  • Nathaniel D Bastian
  • Paul Griffin

Organizations

  • United States Army Research Laboratory

Tags

Communities of Interest

  • Energy and Power Technologies
  • Human Systems

DTIC Thesaurus Topics

  • Aerial Delivery
  • Computer Programming
  • Disasters
  • Engineering
  • Experimental Design
  • Geographic Regions
  • Goal Programming
  • Humanitarian Assistance
  • Logistics
  • Logistics Planning
  • Mathematical Models
  • Military Research
  • Natural Disasters
  • Spreadsheet Software
  • Supply Chain
  • Supply Chain Management
  • Systems Engineering

Readers

  • Emergency Management and Homeland Security.
  • Logistics and Supply Chain Management.
  • Operations Research