Development of a Shipment Policy for Collection Centers

Irais Mora-Ochomogo, Marco Serrato, Jaime Mora-Vargas and Raha Akhavan-Tabatabaei
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Irais Mora-Ochomogo: School of Engineering and Sciences, Tecnologico de Monterrey, Atizapan de Zaragoza 52926, Mexico
Marco Serrato: Office of the Provost, University of Chicago, Chicago, IL 60637, USA
Jaime Mora-Vargas: School of Engineering and Sciences, Tecnologico de Monterrey, Atizapan de Zaragoza 52926, Mexico
Raha Akhavan-Tabatabaei: Sabanci Business School, Sabancı University, Istanbul 34956, Turkey

Mathematics, 2021, vol. 9, issue 12, 1-16

Abstract: Natural disasters represent a latent threat for every country in the world. Due to climate change and other factors, statistics show that they continue to be on the rise. This situation presents a challenge for the communities and the humanitarian organizations to be better prepared and react faster to natural disasters. In some countries, in-kind donations represent a high percentage of the supply for the operations, which presents additional challenges. This research proposes a Markov Decision Process (MDP) model to resemble operations in collection centers, where in-kind donations are received, sorted, packed, and sent to the affected areas. The decision addressed is when to send a shipment considering the uncertainty of the donations’ supply and the demand, as well as the logistics costs and the penalty of unsatisfied demand. As a result of the MDP a Monotone Optimal Non-Decreasing Policy (MONDP) is proposed, which provides valuable insights for decision-makers within this field. Moreover, the necessary conditions to prove the existence of such MONDP are presented.

Keywords: disaster relief; humanitarian logistics; collection centers; donations management; Markov decision process (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2021
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