Beneficiary-centric decision support framework for enhanced resource coordination in humanitarian logistics: A case study from ASEAN

The growing frequency, impact, and complexity of natural-and human -made-disasters have resulted in an increased attention toward humanitarian logistics management practices. With most disasters having a global scale due to the high level of interconnectedness between supply chains, the adequate provision of humanitarian assistance through streamlined logistics systems has become paramount. Correspondingly, the traditional organization-and execution-centric approaches are no longer sufficient, and greater attention to beneficiary-and ecosystem-centric supply chain networks with equal emphasis on planning and execution are necessary. Accord-ingly, this work proposes a multi-method decision support framework to analyze, visualize, optimize, and simulate supply networks to address the key challenge of resource coordination in disaster response operations. A real-world application to the Disaster Emergency Logistics System for ASEAN (DELSA), the network of pre-positioned stockpiles managed by the ASEAN Humani-tarian Agency in ASEAN, is also presented. Results of the analyses show that with the introduction of inventory management policies with safety stock, the DELSA network improves its perfor-mance in service level by +41%. Unlike the current practice where inventory decisions are, in most cases, supply-and funds-driven, the findings of this work bring about a paradigm shift for beneficiary-centric policies. More importantly, the analyses of this study could generate practical insights for proper humanitarian logistics planning not only in ASEAN but throughout the world.