Determination of equivalent warehouses in humanitarian logistics by reallocation of multiple item type inventories

Abstract

Prepositioning freight containers for storage of relief supplies can be considered an alternative to warehousing with shelves. Recently, 25 container warehouses are located in different cities in Turkey to deliver relief supplies to beneficiaries quickly. We take this existing situation as given and investigate if this investment could be utilised better. The available inventory (i.e., tents, beds, blankets) in these container warehouses is currently not used efficiently. Some warehouses store one type of item and none from other types. Therefore, several warehouses must be activated during a response operation to fully satisfy the beneficiaries' needs for each relief item type. We aim to investigate the benefits of operating equivalent (i.e., a proper inventory level from each relief item type) warehouses while reallocating a total available inventory for better coordination. A locationreallocation type of mathematical model is tested with real-life data from past earthquakes. Three to eight container warehouses are recommended to be converted to an equivalent type. The results indicate potential savings for the proposed model, and this potential is more visible in large-scale demand instances than in small ones.