Pre-positioning and dynamic operations planning in pre- and post-disaster phases with lateral transhipment under uncertainty and disruption

Humanitarian organizations pre-position relief items in pre-disaster and distribute them to the affected areas in post-disaster. Improper planning of emergency operations causes more deaths in post-disaster. In this paper, the problem of relief item pre-positioning and multi-period distribution planning is addressed considering lateral transhipment among distribution centres to improve the efficiency of the humanitarian relief chain. The proposed model not only improves cost efficiency of the relief chain, but also enhances the equity and fairness. Therefore, a multi-objective two-stage stochastic programming, which involves imprecise parameters, is developed to address the problem. Moreover, TH method is utilized to solve the proposed multi-objective programming and efficient possibilistic programming is adopted to deal with the imprecise input parameters. Applicability of the proposed model and the effectiveness of the solutions are examined through a numerical analysis. Finally, sensitivity analyses are conducted on key input parameters to extract managerial insights.