Emergency Response Model Analysis

When a disaster strikes, the slow mobility of the relief supplies or their unavailability cause ineffective emergency response and as a result, the human misery and death toll increases many folds. The humanitarian organisations can improve their effectiveness in responding to the natural disasters and other emergency situations by improving their preparedness for the emergency and by ensuring sufficient availability of the relief supplies at the time of need. This can be done by pre-positioning or stock piling inventory at appropriate warehouse locations.
Most importantly, when disasters occur without any provisional phase, an organised and prepared supply network becomes most beneficial in reducing the procurement time for the relief supplies. At the onset of the disaster, the local

Balcik and B. M. Beamon in ‘Facility location in humanitarian relief’ propose a model which is a variant of maximal covering location model. They show experimental results of the model and its working in the real life scenario. The pre-disaster and post-disaster effects are reflected through the model’s result, specifically on response time.
Durane et. al in Pre-Positioning of Emergency Items Worldwide for Care International have evaluated the effect of the relief supply pre-position on CARE’s response time during the relief supply aid at the onset of natural disasters. The model helped CARE to determine the pre-position network. They calculate the average response time suing the weighted time average of the relief aid sent from warehouses and from suppliers.
In ‘Pre-positioning emergency supplies to support disaster relief: a stochastic programming approach’ Walib K. et. al consider the scenario in three phases: disasters scenario generation, design generation and design evaluation. Monte Carlo procedure is used to derive the disaster scenarios. They solved the problem using sample average approximation method. The best design is selected based on a set of performance