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Article

Pre-positioning relief supplies subject to uncertain probability estimates

Muer Yang

Muer Yang

Department of Operations and Supply Chain Management, Opus College of Business, University of St. Thomas, Saint Paul, Minneapolis, MN, USA

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Sameer Kumar

Corresponding 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.

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Xinfang Wang

Xinfang Wang

Department of Enterprise Systems and Analytics, Parker College of Business, Georgia Southern University, Statesboro, GA, USA

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Michael J Fry

Michael J Fry

Department of Operations, Business Analytics, and Information Systems, Carl H. Lindner College of Business, University of Cincinnati, Cincinnati, OH, USA

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First published: 20 July 2025

Abstract

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 ϕ $\phi $ -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.

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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