EconPapers    
Economics at your fingertips  
 

Dispatching policies for last-mile distribution with stochastic supply and demand

Robert A. Cook and Emmett J. Lodree

Transportation Research Part E: Logistics and Transportation Review, 2017, vol. 106, issue C, 353-371

Abstract: Relief distribution has received considerable attention in the disaster operations management literature. However, the majority of this literature assumes that supply is always available. In reality, a significant portion of the materials that flow through the humanitarian relief chain are donations, which represent an uncertain supply source in terms of both quantity and timing. This paper investigates a two-stage relief chain consisting of a single staging area (SA) where donations arrive over time in uncertain quantities, which are periodically distributed to random numbers of disaster survivors located at a point of distribution (POD). A single vehicle travels back and forth between the SA and POD transporting relief supplies during a finite horizon. The goal of this study is to identify dispatching policies for the vehicle with the sole purpose of minimizing unsatisfied demand at the POD. To this end, we examine the effectiveness of two common-sense heuristic policies relative to the optimal dispatching policy, the latter of which is determined via stochastic dynamic programming. Our findings indicate that although continuously dispatching the vehicle between the SA and POD is not an optimal policy, it is either optimal or close to optimal in most situations.

Keywords: Humanitarian supply chain; Donations management; Dynamic programming (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2017
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (13)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1366554517302296
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:transe:v:106:y:2017:i:c:p:353-371

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.elsevier.com/wps/find/journaldescription.cws_home/600244/bibliographic
http://www.elsevier. ... 600244/bibliographic

DOI: 10.1016/j.tre.2017.08.008

Access Statistics for this article

Transportation Research Part E: Logistics and Transportation Review is currently edited by W. Talley

More articles in Transportation Research Part E: Logistics and Transportation Review from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().

 
Page updated 2025-03-19
Handle: RePEc:eee:transe:v:106:y:2017:i:c:p:353-371