In this project, we will develop methods that optimise the delivery of food relief items following a natural disaster. These include inventory management strategies particularly for perishable relief items and robust routing for post-disaster distribution with labour constraints. We will also investigate whether better warehouse locations can be found that can improve the delivery of food relief items in response to a disaster.
The Sendai Framework for Disaster Risk Reduction 2015-2030 puts a strong emphasis on Disaster Risk Management, acknowledging the importance of risk management and strengthening resilience against disasters. Based on the Sendai Framework, the Indonesian government produces a national plan for disaster risk management which highlights the needs for Indonesia to improve its preparedness and response to natural disasters. To execute the plan, Indonesia has established the national board for disaster management overseeing several regional boards for disaster management.
In this project, we work with West Java Regional Disaster Management Agency (BPBD Jawa Barat), West Java Social Services (Dinas Sosial Pemda Jabar), West Java Food Security and Animal Husbandry Services (DKPP Jawa Barat), Bureau of Logistics West Java region (BULOG Kanwil Jabar) and West Java Regional Development Planning Agency (Bappeda Jawa Barat). They are involved from specifying the requirements for the decision support system to developing realistic scenarios to evaluate our methods. West Java province is chosen because it has the highest multi-disaster risk in Indonesia due to the population size, population density, high contribution to Indonesian GDP and being the centre of rice production in Java island (rice is the main staple food in Indonesia).
Our research will enable our model users in Indonesia (Regional Boards for Disaster Management, Regional Boards for Food Security, and Regional Development Planning Agencies) to make better decisions in reducing the risk of natural disasters by storing food relief items at the right amount to allow effective distribution of the emergency food items after a disaster strike. Our model will also help in analysing the locations of current warehouses and suggest if better locations will help improve the inventory and distribution policies. We will produce a decision support system that can be used to help them make those decisions. This capability will strengthen the Indonesian resilience and response to natural disasters. Hence, the society affected by natural disasters will benefit from better preparedness and response by the authorities. The optimum inventory management will reduce the operational cost of maintaining the perishable relief items which results in better value for money for the taxpayers.
Disaster Risk Management (DRM) activities span four phases: mitigation, preparedness, response, and recovery. Based on the Indonesian national plan, we focus our research on the preparedness phase (activities performed prior to disaster to allow more efficient response activities such as pre-positioning inventory of relief items) and the response phase (activities following a disaster to reduce its impact). The majority of research in DRM solves the preparedness and response phases of DRM separately, leading to suboptimal solutions. Furthermore, the solutions tend to be based on just one type of disaster. Another gap is that most research assumes that relief items are non-perishable, relief distribution is well coordinated, and demand and damages are known immediately after a disaster. Our focus on multi-disaster situations incorporating all of the complexities of multiple organisations providing relief support will result in more realistic models, filling the gaps in the literature in DRM and resulting in more impact. The research also extends previous Optimisation-via-Simulation methodology to multi-objective, multi-level problems