Relief Food Supply Model for Disaster Preparedness and Response

Research into modelling and simulation to support disaster management has focused on large disasters. In some regions, there are frequent small to medium scale disasters, which require daily decisions to be made. For example, in Indonesia’s West Java province, on average, there were more than 4 natural disasters per day between 2016 and 2020. These are typically described as routine emergencies in the literature. However, relevant agencies responsible for disaster management need to deploy the same types of resource as in disaster operations such as relief items and shelters. They also face the same challenges such as high uncertainty in the demand and location. This talk presents a tool to support decisions related relief food distribution to disaster victims in a region that is vulnerable to multiple disasters on daily basis such as West Java. Specifically, we develop two models: a procurement model to determine the optimal procurement of relief food items that will be stored at several warehouses in the region and a distribution model to evaluate the current distribution policy. In this model, the region is represented as a network of districts connected via road networks. To illustrate how the two models can support disaster management decision making, we use the West Java case. More detail about the project can be found from www.southampton.ac.uk/relief-ops. This project is funded by the EPSRC (UK).