A model for equity in humanitarian relief supply chain

The Great East Japan Earthquake (GEJE) attacked the North-Eastern Parts of Japan on March 11 in 2011 and the scale of the earthquake was the largest in recorded history in Japan. Supplies came in the form of donation from many countries/regions and organizations. Overall, managing the relief operations for such a large earthquake is very complex in terms of the unknowns of time, place and severity. Other complexities of DRO are coming in terms of finding possible supplies, timely response; human and material resources for relief operations; necessary equipment and information technology, and human interfaces in the distribution of aids. There are some researches about SCM for DROs so far, but there are very few papers found in literature which investigate the situation and lack of information about the demand of relief supplies at the time of occurrence of disaster. To fill the gap, we examined newspaper contents and analyzed how DRO of the GEJE are performed in terms of the principles which were required for the design of SCM for DRO. We propose two additional principles of SCM such as agility and proximity, and analyzed static and dynamic situations separately. The required information of disaster wasn't transmitted to the public was one of the reasons why actual relief operations didn't function. The newspaper reports would play an important role to promote functions of DRO sufficiently in addition to a conventional role as media to transmit real circumstances of the afflicted areas. Our study will contribute the humanitarian logistics literature as well as practitioners to develop disaster relief operations strategies and process. The modelling method of integrated supply chain network for Japanese disaster relief operations in order to organize such as FEMA can manage the activity for provision of relief items centrally. The mathematical model is proposed and investigated.