Deriving rules of thumb for facility decision making in humanitarian operations

In this paper,we investigate the factors that have an impact on the choice of facility configuration for inventory pre-positioning in preparation for emergencies - a critical decision faced by humanitarian managers. Current research in the field is rich with mathematical models and solution algorithms for the problem of pre-positioning emergency supplies. However, due to a lack of a strong mathematical background and/or computational infrastructure, the decision makers rely on simpler rules of thumb to guide their planning. Some managerial implications have been offered in the literature, but these have been derived from sensitivity analyses focused on a single factor and using a single case study, and as such can be misleading as they ignore important interactions between many instance characteristics. We carried out a large experimental study that analyses the effect of different instance characteristics and their interactions on the facility decision making. On the one hand, the outcomes of the study help us identify the most important factors and factor interactions that are further used to yield policy recommendations for facility planning. On the other hand, this study also demonstrates the extent of erroneousness of the guidelines derived from simple analyses, and as such hopefully promotes better experimental designs in the field of humanitarian logistics.