Facility Location Selection for the Humanitarian Needs of Refugees

Abstract

<p>As a result of civil war in Syria and Turkey’s open-door policy, almost 3 million refugees moved to Turkey since March 2011. The unexpected arrival of a large number of refugees within a relatively short period of time caused inadequate planning of the government-operated camps to fulfill the humanitarian needs of those affected individuals. The purpose of this study is to develop an optimization model that helps in the distribution of humanitarian aid to the refugees. The multi-objective optimization model decides on the facility locations by integrating total transportation distance minimization and covered demand maximization. Uncertainties in the supply amount are captured through possible scenarios to determine the optimal facilities that will serve the demand points. We used a weighted sum method to solve the multi-objective optimization problem. Different weights are associated with the objective functions to represent the varying preferences of decision makers and examine how the optimal solution changes.</p>