• Medientyp: E-Artikel
  • Titel: Development of a Shipment Policy for Collection Centers
  • Beteiligte: Mora-Ochomogo, Irais; Serrato, Marco; Mora-Vargas, Jaime; Akhavan-Tabatabaei, Raha
  • Erschienen: MDPI AG, 2021
  • Erschienen in: Mathematics, 9 (2021) 12, Seite 1385
  • Sprache: Englisch
  • DOI: 10.3390/math9121385
  • ISSN: 2227-7390
  • Entstehung:
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  • Beschreibung: Natural disasters represent a latent threat for every country in the world. Due to climate change and other factors, statistics show that they continue to be on the rise. This situation presents a challenge for the communities and the humanitarian organizations to be better prepared and react faster to natural disasters. In some countries, in-kind donations represent a high percentage of the supply for the operations, which presents additional challenges. This research proposes a Markov Decision Process (MDP) model to resemble operations in collection centers, where in-kind donations are received, sorted, packed, and sent to the affected areas. The decision addressed is when to send a shipment considering the uncertainty of the donations’ supply and the demand, as well as the logistics costs and the penalty of unsatisfied demand. As a result of the MDP a Monotone Optimal Non-Decreasing Policy (MONDP) is proposed, which provides valuable insights for decision-makers within this field. Moreover, the necessary conditions to prove the existence of such MONDP are presented.
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