Case studies and random instances for the problem of pre-positioning emergency supplies

Despite a growing body of research on the problem of increasing disaster preparedness by prepositioning relief supplies at strategic locations, there is a lack of a benchmark set of problem instances that hinders thorough hypotheses testing, sensitivity analysis, model validation or solution procedure evaluation. By carefully manipulating some of the instance parameters, we generated 30 case studies that were inspired by 4 instances collected from the literature, that focus on disasters of different type and scale that occurred in different parts of the world. In addition, we developed a tool to algorithmically generate arbitrarily many diverse random instances of any size. The case studies and the random instance generator are made publicly available to foster further research on the problem of pre-positioning relief supplies and humanitarian logistics in general.