Quantifying supply chain network synergy for humanitarian organizations

Both the number of disasters and the number of people affected by disasters are growing, creating a great need for resilient disaster management. In this article, we construct multiproduct supply chain network models for multiple humanitarian organizations. The models capture uncertainty associated with costs of their supply chain activities, including procurement, storage, and distribution, under multiple disaster scenarios, along with uncertainty associated with the demand for the disaster relief products at the demand points. The models reflect the organizations’ operations, without and with cooperation, with the humanitarian organizations seeking to determine the disaster relief multiproduct flows that minimize their expected total cost and risk, subject to expected demand satisfaction. We utilize a mean-variance approach to capture the risk associated with cost uncertainty and propose a synergy measure for the assessment of the potential strategic advantages of cooperation for resilient disaster management. We also identify the role of technology in helping to parameterize the models and illustrate the analytical framework with numerical examples, accompanied by managerial insights.