Modelling beneficiaries' choice in disaster relief logistics

This paper introduces the element of beneficiaries' choice into a location-routing problem for disaster relief logistics suited for decision support systems. Decision makers in humanitarian logistics face the challenge where to establish distribution centers (DCs) for relief goods. For this purpose, two objectives are considered: the impact of the relief operations on the beneficiaries and the efficient use of monetary resources. The proposed multi-objective location-routing model minimizes unserved demand as well as cost for opening DCs and for routing relief goods. It anticipates the choice of beneficiaries to which DC to go (if at all), based on a model adopted from the literature on competitive location analysis. A mathematical programming formulation is presented. For small instances, the Pareto front can be determined exactly using an epsilon constraint method. For solving also realistic instances, an evolutionary algorithm has been implemented and evaluated. The algorithms are tested on real-world instances from Mozambique. The results show that when designing a distribution network, improvements can be achieved by taking the predicted behavior of beneficiaries into account.