The impact of transportation capacity in pre‐positioning humanitarian supplies
与美国联邦应急管理署合作，研究如何在库存优化模型中纳入第三方运输能力，发现忽略卡车运输能力会导致响应时间最多增加18%，并开发了指导决策的指标。
ABSTRACT Humanitarian action saves lives by delivering supplies following a disaster. To effectively prepare, large humanitarian organizations solve optimization models to allocate inventory minimizing expected time‐to‐respond. However, these organizations also rely on transportation carriers to deliver this inventory, a feature often omitted from such models. Part of the reason is that capacity data on third‐party carriers are scant. Nevertheless, there is value in humanitarian organizations asking themselves the following: how should such data be incorporated into a model; how important is it to incorporate transportation capacities; where is it worth increasing transportation capacity? Building on previous inventory optimization models, we partner with the United States Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) to answer these questions by incorporating transportation market capacity. Using public and proprietary data sets, we first approximate the trucking capacity near FEMA's warehouses. We develop intuitive metrics that guide practitioners to make decisions, understand trade‐offs in complex networks, and negotiate contracts. We show that when optimizing inventory, ignoring trucking capacity can lead to up to 18% higher response times. In discussions with FEMA, our research has guided strategic inventory deployment and has been a catalyst in a new initiative for transportation contracting.