PFI-RP: A Smart Food Distribution System for Allocating Scarce Resources Under Extreme Events

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The broader impact/commercial potential of this Partnerships for Innovation - Research Partnerships (PFI-RP) project is to provide direct benefit to organizations engaged in the provision of food aid, which will translate to better outcomes for people and society, particularly with respect to increasing access to food for vulnerable populations during extreme events. Food insecurity is a persistent problem in the US despite the nearly 4 billion pounds of food rescued in 2020 by over 200 food banks. By leveraging actual data from the foodbanks, knowledge of the operations of foodbanks and the use of Artificial Intelligence (AI), the developed system will provide policy recommendations about the collection, storage, and distribution of food that will incorporate fairness in food distribution while reducing the cost of acquiring and distributing food, and cutting down food waste. These recommendations will transform how organizations rapidly adapt their operations according to environmental disruptions. The proposed project will create and enhance the resilience of smart food distribution systems for resource allocation under extreme events directly from data. A generalizable framework for aggregating and standardizing the collection of data across various media (operational data, publicly available) to provide adaptive predictions of supply and need (at scale) will be developed. The developed data-driven optimization models will facilitate near real-time evaluation of food distribution strategies and provide interactive and interpretable model visualizations of the material, financial, and physical capacity of the food distribution networks. Managers responsible for supply chains in medium to large hunger relief organizations will benefit from the Al-driven resource management software to increase the number of food insecure households served. Additionally the project will inform research on decision-making which will ultimately make hunger relief organizations more resilient in extreme situations thus mitigating the negative impacts of disruptions to supply chain networks.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.