Elsevier

Computers & Industrial Engineering

Volume 102, December 2016, Pages 259-267
Computers & Industrial Engineering

The regional cooperation-based warehouse location problem for relief supplies

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cie.2016.10.021Get rights and content

Highlights

  • A regional cooperation-based relief location model considering territorial priority is constructed.

  • A compensation mechanism is adopted to show cooperation in emergency management.

  • It is shown regional cooperation can significantly reduce the maximum expected cost of any region.

  • A case study of the relief warehouse location problem in Beijing is demonstrated.

  • The usefulness of considering both territorial priority and regional cooperation is verified.

Abstract

Regions often cooperate with each other in emergency rescue efforts, often times maintaining the principle of territorial priority. In this paper, a regional cooperation-based relief warehouse location model is constructed that takes into consideration the principle of territorial priority. The objective of the model is to minimize the maximum expected cost of any region. Problems of different size are tested in numerical experiments. Results show that regional cooperation can significantly reduce the maximum expected cost of any region. Then, a case study of the relief warehouse location problem in the Northern Beijing area is demonstrated for the storage of disinfectants to be used in case of large-scale flooding. The expected cost in the pre-disaster planning and the efficiency of the rescue efforts during the disaster are both taken into account. A suitable value of the upper limit for the transport time is obtained. The work of this study verifies the usefulness of considering both territorial priority and regional cooperation in emergency management.

Introduction

Many people are affected by disasters every year. In 2016, about 137 million people were affected by disasters in China as of July 26, especially in the middle and down regions of the Yangtze River. From June 27 to July 4, there were more than 18 million people affected in the Provinces of Anhui and Hubei. Their survival depends on disaster relief assistance. The national level supplies delivered emergency supplies to the affected regions, including tents, folding beds, bedding and so on. Disaster relief work was important in overcoming the loss of life and damages. Effective rescue planning helps to reduce life and property loss, to protect basic livelihoods and to improve a government’s reputation. However, because of inappropriate warehouse locations, some emergency supplies cannot reach the disaster area in time, and some emergency supplies are wasted.

Many emergency management agencies have focused on the warehouse location problem of emergency supplies. For example, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDCP) are entrusted with the task of establishing the Strategic National Stockpile (SNS). Medicines will be delivered to any state in the United States within 12 h of the SNS being needed. The Foreign Disaster Assistance Office (OFDA) has been established for international relief by the United States. There are seven warehouses for emergency supplies in the world. The OFDA will send rescue supplies to the disaster area from the nearest warehouse if it is needed. In China, the Ministry of Civil Affairs has built ten central warehouses for emergency supplies. Relief supplies will be transported to the affected areas when a disaster occurs.

Emergency management is administered under the principle of territorial priority. Emergency rescue is a complex work that needs a detailed understanding of each region. The Law of the People’s Republic of China on Response to Emergencies has emphasized that the territorial priority principle should be applied in emergency management. This law requires emergency managers to be responsible for emergencies in their jurisdictional region. The emergency management system in the United States has also mentioned the territorial priority principle. The National Incident Management System has emphasized that most incidents are managed locally. Emergency managers need to reserve emergency supplies before a disaster occurs and to operate the relief efforts during disasters. However, no research to date has provided guidance regarding the regional cooperation under the territorial priority principle.

The problem of regional cooperation is studied under the territorial priority principle in this paper. There is no government, at the local, state or federal, that has all of the resources to respond to all disasters because of the uncertainty of disasters, and interstate cooperation is more efficient than states operating alone in disasters. The Emergency Management Assistance Compact (EMAC) in the United States is a law for emergency management cooperation among the states. EMAC is a basic institutional framework for the state’s emergency management cooperation. States can integrate and transfer resources between all regions rapidly and orderly, according to the severity of the disaster. EMAC achieved large-scale rescue supply allocation during hurricanes Katrina and Rita. More than 60,000 rescue workers from 49 states participated in the rescue efforts. This rescue work illustrated the necessity of cooperative rescue efforts among the regions for a sudden cross-border disaster. During a disaster, governments strive to cooperate. However, governments seldom consider cooperation regarding the emergency supply reserve between the regions before a disaster occurs.

A regional cooperation-based emergency supply reserve model cannot only reduce the cost for each region but also can improve the efficiency of the rescue efforts during a disaster. For example, there may be a region that needs little supply possibly due to being in a low population density area and has low likelihood of an emergency occurring in that region, and without cooperation a warehouse may still need to be built and located in the region. However, in the case of regional cooperation, supplies for this region could be stored in a warehouse of another region for some compensation. This could possibly benefit both regions. For another example, there may be a demand point in a region which is close to demand points of another region, and regional cooperation could possibly reduce the transport cost and time.

A regional cooperation-based emergency supply warehouse location model is established in this paper. A scenario-based method (Verma & Gaukler, 2014) is used to address the uncertainty of the disaster. A disaster impact function is developed to measure the impact of the disaster. Compensation is employed to promote regional cooperation under the territorial priority management principle. Numerical experiments analyze problems of different size. Finally, we provide a flooding example in the northern areas of Beijing to study the best locations for the warehouses.

The remainder of this paper is organized as follows. In Section 2, we present an overview of the existing literature. Section 3 provides a formulation of the location problem that considers regional cooperation under the territorial priority management principle. Section 4 provides numerical experiments of our model. Section 5 concludes the paper.

Section snippets

Literature review

The literature review of this paper covers three areas: the emergency facility location problem, the emergency management cooperation problem, and disaster evolution.

The facility location problem is a classical problem in operations research and management science. The emergency facility location problem typically has more uncertainty than the traditional location problem. Church and ReVelle (1974) proposed the maximum coverage location problem. The researchers noted that the model was suitable

Problem description

In the emergency supply warehouse location problem, regional cooperation is considered under the territorial priority principle. This paper assumes that there are several regions in the area. Warehouses that belong to the area are called first-level warehouses and those that belong to the regions are called second-level warehouses. Supplies stored at the second-level warehouses belong to the region while the supplies stored in the first-level warehouses belong to the area. We assume a region

Numerical experiments

We run two sets of experiments to demonstrate different aspects of our proposed model. The first set of experiments show the performance of the models for different problem sizes. The second set of experiments determines the appropriate compensation amount for a flood emergency supply warehouse location problem in the northern regions of Beijing. The model is solved using an optimization toolbox YALMIP (Löfberg, 2004). The solver of the toolbox is CPLEX12.6 and the programming software is

Conclusions

In this paper, the warehouse location problem for emergency supplies is studied which considers regional cooperation under the principle of territorial priority. The results in this paper are helpful to justify the rationality of regional cooperation in emergency management.

A warehouse location model for emergency supplies is developed. A scenario-based method is used to address the uncertainty of the disaster in the model. In addition, the disaster impact function is proposed to measure the

Acknowledgment

The authors thank sincerely the anonymous reviewers for their valuable suggestions. This work was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China under Grant No. 91224007. This support is gratefully acknowledged.

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