 Food donation management under supply and demand uncertainties in COVID-19: A robust optimization approachJyotirmoy Dalal Socio-Economic Planning Sciences, 2022, vol. 82, issue PA Abstract: COVID-19 pandemic and the associated lockdown have globally impacted the food-insecure low-income population. A community-based initiative of an NPO - working on malnutrition issues among the below poverty line children in an urban Indian setting - towards adoption of the slum- and shelter-dwelling children, faced challenges during the pandemic in tackling the twofold uncertainties regarding supply capacity reduction and demand surge. This paper extends earlier research on this NPO's pre-COVID-time food assistance program by introducing a robust optimization-based mathematical programming model to determine the donors to engage, donor-to-beneficiary allocations, and the associated optimal donation flows while addressing these uncertainties. The issue of over-conservatism in robust optimization is addressed by parameterizing the decision-maker's uncertainty budget. We present a detailed numerical study on a test problem along with interesting observations elicited by our sensitivity analyses. Keywords: Food insecurity; Uncertainty; COVID-19; Robust optimization; Nonprofit operations (search for similar items in EconPapers) Downloads: (external link) Related works: Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:soceps:v:82:y:2022:i:pa:s0038012121002020 DOI: 10.1016/j.seps.2021.101210 Access Statistics for this article Socio-Economic Planning Sciences is currently edited by Barnett R. Parker More articles in Socio-Economic Planning Sciences from Elsevier |
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