Integrated decision support framework for enhancing disaster preparedness: A pilot application in Indonesia

The combination of climate change, rampant urbanization, political and social instabilities, is expected to increase the frequency and ferocity of humanitarian crises in the near future. Unpredictability of demand, narrow lead times, highly chaotic and rapidly changing circumstances demand for a different approach to disaster management. The traditional event-based approach to manage natural hazards is, in fact, no longer economically viable, and it should be transformed into a risk-based management slant with a strong emphasis on planning, in preparedness. This paper is an attempt in that direction and proposes an integration of multi-criteria decision-making, network optimization, and discrete event simulation, to address inventory prepositioning for improving efficiency, effectiveness, and agility of relief chains. While humanitarian logistics has been traditionally relying on the sole practical experience of practitioners, this paper makes a case for a paradigm shift as it proposed an interdisciplinary approach integrating that practical experience with analytical and dynamic simulation methods that have been widely applied in the commercial supply chain arena. A real-life case study about Indonesia, one of the countries with the highest disaster risk exposure on a global scale, has been investigated with the use of anyLogistix software. The findings of this work depict the ideal network configuration along with transportation and inventory policies for the case at hand.