Pre-positioning of emergency supplies: Does putting a price on human life help to save lives?

The number of people affected by natural disasters or displaced by conflict, persecution, violence or human rights violations has been steadily increasing, doubling in a decade and reaching 130.5 million in 2016. Fortunately, such trends have been accompanied by a growing research interest in the field of humanitarian logistics that investigates mechanisms which can improve assistance to disaster-a ected communities and thus minimize human suffering. In spite of acknowledging a major difference between such an objective and the priorities of business logistics, many authors still adopt disaster relief problem formulations that aim to minimize costs. In this paper, we list a number of issues with the cost-minimizing approach, placing emphasis on the significant challenge of determining the controversial economic value of human su ering that is usually a part of such formulations. In order to circumvent these issues, we formulate an alternative mathematical model that maximizes response directly. The discussion about the cost-minimizing and our alternative approach is illustrated with the problem of increasing emergency preparedness by pre-positioning relief items at strategic locations. We evaluate the two formulations of the pre-positioning problem using a number of randomly generated instances and a case study focused on hurricane threat in the Gulf Coast area of the United States. The optimal solution of our model always meets at least the same percentage of demand as the cost-minimizing model, and is obtained in comparable computation time. Our study therefore suggests that putting a price on human life can and ergo should be avoided.