Pre-positioning relief supplies subject to uncertain probability estimates
Muer Yang
Department of Operations and Supply Chain Management, Opus College of Business, University of St. Thomas, Saint Paul, Minneapolis, MN, USA
Search for more papers by this authorCorresponding Author
Sameer Kumar
Department of Operations and Supply Chain Management, Opus College of Business, University of St. Thomas, Saint Paul, Minneapolis, MN, USA
Corresponding author.
Search for more papers by this authorXinfang Wang
Department of Enterprise Systems and Analytics, Parker College of Business, Georgia Southern University, Statesboro, GA, USA
Search for more papers by this authorMichael J Fry
Department of Operations, Business Analytics, and Information Systems, Carl H. Lindner College of Business, University of Cincinnati, Cincinnati, OH, USA
Search for more papers by this authorMuer Yang
Department of Operations and Supply Chain Management, Opus College of Business, University of St. Thomas, Saint Paul, Minneapolis, MN, USA
Search for more papers by this authorCorresponding Author
Sameer Kumar
Department of Operations and Supply Chain Management, Opus College of Business, University of St. Thomas, Saint Paul, Minneapolis, MN, USA
Corresponding author.
Search for more papers by this authorXinfang Wang
Department of Enterprise Systems and Analytics, Parker College of Business, Georgia Southern University, Statesboro, GA, USA
Search for more papers by this authorMichael J Fry
Department of Operations, Business Analytics, and Information Systems, Carl H. Lindner College of Business, University of Cincinnati, Cincinnati, OH, USA
Search for more papers by this authorAbstract
Strategically pre-positioning relief supplies before disasters can reduce both response times and supply costs. However, accurately estimating the probabilities of disaster occurrences is difficult due to limited historical data and cognitive biases in decision-making. Prior research has demonstrated the effectiveness of robust-modeling approaches to such problems. This paper expands the prior work by incorporating -divergence uncertainty regions into decision-making models to account for uncertainty in scenario probability estimates. An extensive numerical study using Monte Carlo simulation studies applied to a real-world case study of hurricane preparedness in the Southeastern United States demonstrates that our models yield lower expected response costs, compared to traditional stochastic optimization approaches. Additionally, we show that explicitly incorporating knowledge of cognitive biases in probability estimation can significantly enhance decision-making effectiveness and cost efficiency.
Open Research
Data Availability Statement
The datasets generated during and/or analyzed during this study are available from the corresponding author on reasonable request.
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