The PrePositioning of Warehouses at Regional and Local Levels for a Humanitarian Relief Organization

Locating pre-positioned warehouses in strategic locations around the world is an approach that is used by some humanitarian relief organizations to improve their capacities to deliver sufficient relief aid within a relatively short time frame, and to provide shelter and assistance to disaster victims. Although research into the facility location problem is extensive in both theory and application, these problems have not received much attention from the humanitarian relief perspective. In this paper we consider the pre-positioning of warehouses for humanitarian relief organisations from both macro (which country, which region?) and micro (the local location) perspectives, and analyse the managerial implications of those decisions. In case study A, managerial level officers were interviewed in order to obtain data for an analysis of the positioning of warehouses at a regional level. Case study B identifies a specific location in the Dubai area where stakeholders from different organisations participated in both discussions and interviews. Through the use of the Analytic Hierarchical Process, the structure of the location selection problems was analysed. The fuzzy-TOPSIS method was used to obtain the final ranking of locations where linguistic values handle the vagueness and subjectivity of decisions. The contribution of this work as follow: we provide useful managerial insights and implications related to the pre-positioning of warehouses and guide the identification of the warehouse location through a robust framework for multi-criteria decision making for humanitarian relief organisations.

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