Reliable design of a prepositioning network of emergence supplier under facility disruption risks

Prepositioning network of emergency supplies is significant infrastructure of a country for reducing or eliminating the impact of disasters. The most important content of designing this network is determining the locations of facilities for prepositioning supplies to be used during a disaster. The closer facilities are located to the disaster-prone areas, the faster supplies are delivered to demand points after the disaster. However, as a result of being closer, the facility may be disrupted by the disaster. In this study, we develop a location model that considers the facility failure probabilities and transportation time constraints. If a facility is failure, the demand points delivered by the disrupted facility are reassigned to another open facility in this model. The purpose is to choose the locations of facilities such that a reliable prepositioning network of emergency supplies to support the disaster response operations is constructed. The model minimizes initial setup costs and expected transportation costs. The locations produced by the proposed model are compared to those produced by the model without considering facility disruption by using a real problem. Finally we study sensitivity of the results with respect to key parameters.