LAUSR

In disaster relief, one major concern is to have an efficient network to supply and distribute critical items such as blood to the affected areas. Based on a real case study, a tailored disaster relief blood supply chain problem is carried out for the responsive and reliable supply of blood. The case study necessitates incorporating three criteria, (1) urgency (U) of the injured and their priority-based demand, (2) the fairness (F) of blood distribution among the demand points, and (3) the risk (R) factor arising from uncertain nature of the network parameters and potential threat of disruptions (thereafter called U.F.R). Arisen from disaster condition, two major risk factors have been tracked by a robust optimization framework to cope with the operational risk (input uncertainty) as well as the disruption risk. Also, since the disaster may interrupt the SC activities such as blood collection processes, the SC facilities must be located on the most ideal place where is practically decided based on a number of criteria. Thus, the case calls for a group multi-criteria decision making method developed for the problem. To accommodate the requirements of the case study, a mixed integer robust equity-based bi-objective formulation (REBF) is proposed. Computational experiments of our case study reveal that the REBF can make a trade-off between costs and fairness in the quantity of deliveries and achieve a reliable solution in the disaster emergency case.