Social Sustainability-Oriented Multi-Period Medical Supply Adjustment in Response to Disasters

Abstract

Before the occurrence of disasters, medical supplies should have been prepared at warehouses to support the infected cases. As the possible mismatch between initial medical supply preparedness and actual disaster situation, it would trigger off serious social outcomes. Thus, taking medical supply adjustment operations among the warehouses is an imperative task to ensure the sustainable development of society. However, a single-period logistics action with fully uncertain information usually leads to sub-optimal schemes. In this sense, multi-period planning for medical resource adjustment is required with the concern of social sustainability, where the uncertain information is promptly adjusted following real-time cases in different periods. With the socially sustainable goals, a multi-objective stochastic optimization model is developed to facilitate the multi-period sustainable relief supply adjustment problem, which can be divided into two subproblems. The first sub-problem contains two conflicting objective functions, where a specific $\varepsilon $ -constraint method is developed. After that, a linearization approach is applied due to the nonlinearity of the proposed model. Finally, Yushu Earthquake is considered to validate the effectiveness of the proposed model. It is found that the multi-period planning for the relief supply adjustment problem outperforms compared with a single-period one in terms of social sustainability.

Keywords

• Humanitarian logistics
• medical supply adjustment
• social sustainability
• stochastic optimization model