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

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.
The original document contains color images. Prepared in collaboration with the Department of Industrial & Manufacturing Engineering, The Pennsylvania State University, University Park, the School of Industrial & Systems Engineering, Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, and the Rawls College of Business Administraion, Texas Tech University, Lubbock.