Optimal location, capacity and timing of stockpiles for improved hurricane preparedness

Department

Economics, Finance and Quantitative Analysis

Document Type

Article

Publication Date

4-1-2016

Abstract

Applying historical hurricane data to model storm related uncertainty, this paper develops a stochastic optimization model to determine the stockpile location and capacities of medical supplies for improved disaster preparedness in the event of a hurricane. Our models incorporate facility damage and casualty losses, based upon their severity levels and remaining survivability time, as a function of time variant changes in hurricane conditions. To determine the optimal deployment time, we use an optimal stopping time framework to model the trade-offs between increasing costs and reduced uncertainty as the hurricane approaches landfall. Finally, aided by an innovative mixed integer programming model, we develop an evolutionary optimization heuristic that yields time efficient high quality solutions for solving large-scale problems, and we demonstrate the applicability of the approach via illustrative numeric examples.

Journal Title

International Journal of Production Economics

Journal ISSN

0925-5273

Volume

174

First Page

11

Last Page

28

Digital Object Identifier (DOI)

10.1016/j.ijpe.2016.01.006

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