Unsolicited bilateral donations from international aid – Facilitating distribution during urgency calls

Description

Disaster response funding typology is fundamentally consisting of monetary and in-kind donations. The latter represents the goods and services collected and distributed to the disaster-affected area. Even though batches of in-kind donations, also referred to as unsolicited bilateral donations (UBDs), are oftentimes organized at a fast pace, they impose challenges in the emergency supply program. Unannounced or very-short notice upon arrival, erroneous paperwork, non-standard items, and incorrect packaging are a few burdens imposed by UBDs for organizing response supply flows. By considering this setting, this work presents a modeling framework to optimize operations that address UDBs from surrounding and distant countries to the people affected by the disaster. A stochastic program that models a two-stage distribution setting is presented. In the first stage, goods and services are screened and sorted based on applicable nomenclature guidelines developed in the commercial industries. Further on, consolidation and delivery packages are planned in the second stage. Related operational parameters are variated to assess the screening and sorting time sensitiveness in the overall response planning. The model serves as a managerial decision supporter, especially for clustered humanitarian organizations and logistic service providers that program a donation operation. Additionally, this work evaluates the current service request types of such programming clusters.

Period	3 Jul 2022 → 6 Jul 2022
Event title	EURO 2022
Event type	Unkonwn
Degree of Recognition	International