Does exploring the characteristics of emergency supplies really matter for disaster response operations?

This article aims to provide a quantitative study of immediate food supplies based on a three-stage analysis. Firstly, a numerical autoregressive integrative moving average (ARIMA) model is estimated based on the data of 14 key commodities in Sendai City of Japan during the 2011 Tohoku Earthquake. Though the temporal patterns of key food commodity groups are qualitatively similar, the results show that they tend to follow different ARIMA processes, with different autoregressive moving averages and difference order patterns. Second, 3 of the 14 items are found to be significantly related to the number of temporary residents in shelters, revealing that the relatively low number of different items makes it easier to deploy these key supplies or develop regional purchase agreements at an early stage. Finally, a network simulation of response operations performed in temporary shelters based on four specific policies shows that the exploration of the characteristics of critical emergency supplies is the key that strategically enables both effectiveness and efficiency when responding to a disaster situation.