Relief Supply Chain Planning under Uncertainty: Fair Allocation of In-Kind Donations in the Post-Disaster Phase

Zehranaz Dönmez Varol

Disaster response aims to address the immediate needs of affected populations under highly uncertain conditions. In disaster relief supply chains, demand arises from disaster victims (often considered internally displaced populations) while supply primarily consists of in-kind donations. This study focuses on designing a fair mechanism for distributing a scarce relief item among a set of demand points under donation uncertainty. The problem is formulated as a multi-period location-inventory model with coverage constraints. Supply uncertainty is incorporated through a multi-stage stochastic programming approach. A set of mobile facilities, referred to as points of distribution (PoDs), is used to distribute the collected donations. In each period of the planning horizon, two key decisions are made: (i) the locations of a limited number of mobile PoDs and (ii) the quantities delivered from each PoD to each demand node. To capture fairness considerations, a deprivation cost is introduced to quantify the suffering experienced by populations lacking access to critical items. The proposed modeling framework is evaluated using instances constructed from real data available in the literature. The results demonstrate that explicitly accounting for fairness provides improved decision support in disaster response planning.

Short Bio

Zehranaz Dönmez Varol received her Ph.D. in 2024 from Bilkent University, Department of Industrial Engineering, where her research focused on the fair allocation of in-kind donations in postdisaster response. She subsequently completed a postdoctoral project at the Professorship of Business Analytics & Intelligent Systems at the Technical University of Munich. Her research addresses logistics challenges in uncertain environments, with a particular emphasis on humanitarian and healthcare applications. She is a recipient of the EURO WISDOM YoungWomen4OR Award (2024) and has been supported by multiple research fellowships from TÜBİTAK, including doctoral and international postdoctoral scholarships.

Venue

Friday, February 20, 2026, 4.00 pm

IE Building, Halim Doğrusöz Auditorium (IE 03)