Warehouse pre-positioning for disaster relief in Southern African Development Communities

Abstract

At any given time people around the world are adversely a ected by the impact of current or recent disasters. This is increasingly true as increase in population density, population migration, and technological development amplify the severity, and in some cases the frequency, of disasters. The number of people killed in disasters is estimated to be three to four times higher in developing countries than in the developed ones and the number a ected is estimated to be forty times higher in the former. In addition, the severity of the consequences is also higher. The objective of disaster response in the humanitarian relief chain is to rapidly provide relief to areas a ected by large-scale emergencies, so as to minimise human su ering and death. This project focused on nding an appropriate way to determine the required number of pre-positioned emergency supply warehouses and adequate locations to place these warehouses in order to enable the quick movement of the required aid supplies from these facilities to areas in Southern African Development Communities (SADC) a ected by the occurrence of disasters. To achieve this, a Maximal Covering Location Problem (MCLP), that includes spatial objects rather than single points, partial coverage, and weights assigned to disaster areas, was used to suggest potential locations for warehouses in SADC that will maximise the coverage of the more disaster-prone areas. The problem was subsequently solved, still using spatial objects and the same weights, but without partial coverage, to compare and validate the results of the models.