Military Three-Echelon Disaster Relief Supply Chain Management

Canadian Armed Forces is a major contributor to domestic and international disaster relief missions characterizing complex operations demanding significant resources, including equipment, medical supplies, and food. For these operations to be successful, ensuring cost-effective and timely resource utilization and support is crucial. This paper describes the development of models and algorithms to improve distribution and inventory management of resources for disaster missions. A military three echelon Supply Chain Network problem is specifically targeted. Challenges addressed and novelties of the models include: (a) integration of inventory management and distribution management, (b) simultaneously addressing several realistic features of supply chain management within one problem, (c) having an extended network that includes the different scales for transportation times, and (d) the intrinsic complexities of multi echelon, multi-period discrete optimization problems. Both deterministic and stochastic problems dimensions are addressed. This work is intended to provide advanced decision support tools to support disaster relief logistics military leaders. It is aimed at optimizing supply chain management resources utilization while reducing time and costs to achieve efficient supply delivery such as food, water, medicine and equipment.