HUMANITARIAN LOGISTICS AND INVENTORY MODEL BASED ON PROBABILISTIC CELLULAR AUTOMATA

Logistics and inventory operations, which involve transportation, communication, and storage management, are a crucial part of disaster relief. Chaotic conditions after a disaster might cause imbalances in the inventory level at each storage location or shelter. To ensure an even level of inventory among shelters, a new approach for modeling logistics and inventory operations after a natural disaster using probabilistic cellular automata is proposed. In our model, two states – normal and abnormal – represent the inventory level of each shelter. Each shelter receives items from a central warehouse and can transfer their items to other shelters. Our model uses eight parameters to characterize the dynamic interactions among shelters.