| The vulnerability of modern societies to the significant social and economic impacts of disasters is one of the most serious problems affecting the world today. For this reason, it is imperative to put in place efficient processes that maximize the effectiveness of the humanitarian response. A problem is that most state of the art formulations for humanitarian logistics are extensions of methods originally developed for commercial applications that focus only on the minimization of operational costs. This research recognizes the importance of these costs, but postulates that disaster response operations have an additional external (deprivation) cost component. Based on concepts widely discussed by scholars in economics and the social sciences, this research considers the loss in welfare associated with beneficiaries not having access to critical commodities as a deprivation cost that should be valued and incorporated to the decision making process. Following this new approach to humanitarian logistics modeling, formulations for the allocation of limited supplies are developed in which the optimal solution is the strategy minimizing the total social costs incurred in responding to the disaster, as determined by both operational and social considerations. Using formulations and numerical examples, it is shown that when humanitarian logistic strategies do not consider deprivation costs, human suffering is not minimized, far from it. Furthermore, it is shown that traditional methods based on pre-defined levels of service in the form of equity constraints or penalty factors are arbitrary in nature; and likely to lead to high social costs and either infeasible or suboptimal solutions. |
