Integrated planning for humanitarian and healthcare logistics

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Our world is in constant crisis and we need to serve our communities better. For this reason, humanitarian and healthcare logistics have gained increased attention from academics on operational research and management science (OR/MS) in the last ten years. Scientists are motivated by the definition of new and hard-to-solve optimization problems, as well as the positive impact sought from a practical standpoint. From one side, climate change, political conflicts and social disparities are causing damage everywhere. On the other side, (public) healthcare organizations need logistics to deliver healthcare services with resources that become scarcer each time, to a larger population (as is the case of countries with low income) or with large elderly communities (as in high income countries). In all cases, logistics play a key role in the delivery of help to people in need, when needed, as needed, and with efficacy, equity and efficiency. ******To plan and use a distribution network that responds to the challenges of humanitarian and healthcare organizations, OR/MS offers tools to support decision-making in problems such as network design, transportation planning and resource allocation. However, the particularities of these contexts call for new models and resolution tools, whether to plan a long-term logistics network (e.g., for humanitarian development or healthcare services), or to deploy their efforts only for a short period (e.g., disaster relief, temporary medical centers or blood collection units). ******My research program aims, in the long term, to provide a methodological framework to jointly plan and exploit distribution networks that optimize the use of resources, while achieving the goals of these organizations. To accomplish this long-term objective, in the next five years I propose to tackle four critical questions about integrated logistic planning that have yet to be addressed in the literature. First, I will study and identify common ground in distribution networks for humanitarian and healthcare logistics seeking research synergy in these domains. Second, I will investigate the integration of inventory management to the location routing problem, to provide planning tools capable of considering these three problems holistically. Third, I will create models and resolution tools to decide not only how to design the networks with a routing plan, but how to distribute the key resources (as vehicles or staff). Finally, I will investigate how to include other goals (equity, reliability) to the integrated planning approach, using multi-criterion optimization. This research program will contribute to the fields of logistics and optimization by expanding our understanding of integrated logistic planning. Moreover, it pursues a contribution to economic and social welfare by providing efficient decision support tools to real-life challenges from humanitarian and healthcare organizations.