Multi Criteria Decision Making for the Selection of a New Hub Facility Location in Humanitarian Supply Chains
Abstract
Trying to help people affected by hundreds of disasters around the world, is a necessity of being a “human” and an important movement for all humanity. As part of these efforts, humanitarian agencies and academicians have been focusing on humanitarian logistics. The World Food Programme (WFP) is one of the leading organizations that help over 80 million people every year. According to WFP, almost half of the necessary materials are supplied in the country or region where the crisis is located, and the other half is supplied and shipped internationally. These international grants are provided by the United Nations Humanitarian Depots managed by the WFP. The key elements of this network are the centers located close to the disaster areas where the emergency materials are stored. In this study, a decision support plan has been proposed to choose among suitable new facility candidates evaluated for use when necessary. In the multi-criteria decision-making problem discussed, alternative locations are examined according to the related criteria such as immediate mobilization, cost efficiency, stability of the hosting zone, disaster-prone area, training abilities for humanitarian services, and economies of scale. A robust method is used considering the linguistic evaluations, together with the fuzzy information.
Keywords
Humanitarian Logistics, Multi Criteria Decision Making, MULTIMOORA, World Food Programme
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