Reliable design of humanitarian supply chain under correlated disruptions: a two-stage distributionally robust approach

ChangJun Wang () and Li-Meng-Tao Zhong
Additional contact information
ChangJun Wang: Donghua University, Glorious Sun School of Business and Management
Li-Meng-Tao Zhong: Sichuan University, Business School

Annals of Operations Research, 2025, vol. 355, issue 3, No 9, 2999-3047

Abstract: Abstract This paper considers a humanitarian supply chain (SC) under uncertain correlated disruptions of facilities caused by unpredictable disasters. Prepositioned relief items in these facilities might be partly damaged. Hence, it is of great importance to design a reliable SC to mitigate the disruptions. However, the challenge is that the joint disruption distribution is usually unavailable due to the scarcity of disaster data. To address this issue, our study considers that only the disruption probability of each relief item storage point is known, and develops a two-stage distributionally robust optimization (DRO) model based on the ambiguity set under the given marginal failure probabilities. Multiple resilience strategies are optimized in an integrated way, including inventory prepositioning strategy and often-used relief activities, e.g., relief item replenishment, transshipment, and demand transfer. We uncover the relationship between the worst-case joint distribution and supermodular order by exploring the structure–property of the recourse model, which is a generic relief logistics problem, and then identify the closed-form worst-case disruption distribution that lies within the ambiguity set for the robust counterpart. Thus, an equivalent stochastic program is formulated to address the intractability of the two-stage DRO. To validate its applicability, the proposed approach is applied to address the reliable design of a blood SC, in which pre-stocked human blood in hospitals may be partly ruined in disasters. Finally, a real-world case study of the Longmenshan Fault in China is performed. The sensitivity analysis and out-of-sample test are also implemented to give findings and insights. Our study reveals how to strategically preposition inventory with the consideration of disruptive facilities (uncertain correlations and geographic positions), relief items (perishability and shortage penalty), other anti-disaster strategies, as well as the two-stage decision-making way. Thus, our work addresses the reliable SC design under uncertain correlation by efficiently utilizing the minimal disruption information and developing a computationally tractable way.

Keywords: Humanitarian supply chain; Uncertain correlated disruptions; Two-stage distributionally robust; Supermodularity; Blood supply chain; Longmenshan fault (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2025
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://link.springer.com/10.1007/s10479-024-05916-7 Abstract (text/html)
Access to the full text of the articles in this series is restricted.

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:spr:annopr:v:355:y:2025:i:3:d:10.1007_s10479-024-05916-7

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.springer.com/journal/10479

DOI: 10.1007/s10479-024-05916-7

Access Statistics for this article

Annals of Operations Research is currently edited by Endre Boros

More articles in Annals of Operations Research from Springer
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().