Relief supply collaboration for emergency logistics responses to large-scale disasters

This paper proposes a novel relief supply collaboration approach to address the issue of post-disaster relief supply-demand imbalance in emergency logistics (EL) operations. This proposed approach involves two levels of recursive functions: (1) a two-stage relief supplier clustering mechanism for time-varying multi-source relief supplier selection and (2) the use of stochastic dynamic programming model to determine a multi-source relief supply that minimises the impact of relief supply-demand imbalance during EL response. The distinctive features of this proposed approach are to identify the potential relief suppliers and to minimise the imbalanced supply-demand impact under relief supply collaboration. Scenario design and model tests are conducted to demonstrate that relief supply collaboration with grouped relief suppliers has a significant benefit of alleviating the impact of imbalanced relief supply-demand, relative to collaboration with ungrouped ones.