Facility Location And Allocation In Humanitarian Logistics: A Case Study Of Thailand

Abstract

The efficiency of humanitarian aid and the safety of affected people mainly depend on the decisions relating to where to locate shelters and how to arrange properly the number of beneficiaries to each chosen shelter. This study was aimed at developing a mathematical optimization model for deciding where to establish shelters among potential ones and how to assign impacted people into proper chosen shelters. This model is a multi-objective one and there are three objective functions established to enhance the performance of the disaster response. The foremost objective is to lower the total amount of costs, which includes costs for building the shelters, costs for transporting impacted people, and costs for paying wage of employees in each shelter. Reducing the overall total duration for transporting the affected people from all impacted zones to designated shelters is considered as the subsequent objective. The last one is to diminish the quantity of places of shelter needed to provide complete assistance to impacted people. And then the Epsilon Constraint method is used to find out results for the suggested model. The effectiveness and feasibility of the suggested model is proven by an instance of inundation of the largest of the southern provinces in Thailand. The outcomes achieved by applying the suggested mathematical model is then contrasted with the existing strategy made by the public sector of Thailand. The contrasts indicate that the outcomes attained from applying the suggested model surpass the existing strategy of government. Moreover, decision makers pondering how to set up the appropriate strategy to save victims as much as possible could benefit from the outcome of this thesis and have more insights about humanitarian aid process.