Humanitarian Supply Chain Risks

Dr. Wasantha Premarathne

Senior Lecturer, KDU
• Risk management can help identify and evaluate risky and unexpected
situations and present strategies to reduce the risks.
• Reducing the probability of HSC risk is important for improving the
efficiency of relief operations.
• HSC is the processes and systems involved in mobilizing people,
resources, skills and knowledge to help vulnerable people affected by
the disaster. HSCs show the extremes of a trend towards more
uncertainty and risk prevalent in today’s global business SCs.
• Humanitarian logistics contains a range of activities including
preparedness, planning, procurement, transport, warehousing, tracking
and tracing, and customs clearances.
• The main goal of HSCs is saving lives and mitigating human suffering.
• According to the literature of this field, HSC is usually divided into four stages
which are:
• (i) Mitigation: refers to laws and mechanisms that reduce social vulnerability.
• (ii) Preparation: refers to various operations that occur during the period
before a disaster strikes.
• (iii) Response: refers to the various operations that are instantly
implemented after a disaster occurs.
• (iv) Reconstruction: refers to different operations in the aftermath of a
disaster. It involves rehabilitation, and this phase aims to address the
problem.
• As mentioned above, HSC involved many stages and players that each
player in any stage encounters various risks. Hence, the efficiency of
the chain depends on the proper management of these risks.
• Risk is defined as uncertainty based on a well-grounded probability.
Also, Risk is defined as: Risk = (the probability that events will occur) *
(the outcomes if it does occur)
• Risk management aims to identify and evaluate risky situations and
presents strategies to reduce risk.
• Risk management focused on recognition, analysis and economical
control of risks, or probability of risks which can threat properties and
economical incomes of companies.
• The most commonly used methods for estimating criteria weights are
• AHP (Saaty [41]) and
• the Analytic Network Process (ANP) (Saaty [42,43]),
• whereas, among the new criteria weight determination approaches,
• SWARA (Kersuliene et al. [44]),
• Factor Relationship (FARE) (Ginevicius, [45]),
• BWM (Rezaei, [46]),
• Extended SWARA (Hashemkhani Zolfani et al. [47]), and
• Full Consistency Method (FUCOM) (Pamucar et al. [48])
• A new method, called best-worst method (BWM) was
proposed to solve multi-criteria decision-making (MCDM)
problems.
• In an MCDM problem, a number of alternatives are
evaluated with respect to a number of criteria in order to
select the best alternative(s).
• According to BWM, the best (e.g. most desirable, most
important) and the worst (e.g. least desirable, least
important) criteria are identified first by the decision-maker.
• Pairwise comparisons are then conducted between each of
these two criteria (best and worst) and the other criteria.
• A maximin problem is then formulated and solved to
determine the weights of different criteria.
• The weights of the alternatives with respect to different
criteria are obtained using the same process.
• The final scores of the alternatives are derived by
aggregating the weights from different sets of criteria and
alternatives, based on which the best alternative is selected.
• A consistency ratio is proposed for the BWM to check the reliability of
the comparisons.
The structure and basic steps of BWM
method is as follows
• Step 1: Selecting and identifying criteria in a common way; literature
review, expert ideas and other probable ways.
• Step 2. Identifying and selecting the best and worst criteria based on
experts’ ideas and opinions.
• Step 3. Designing the preferences matrix based of comparing best
criterion over all others by applying numbers ranging between 1 and
9.
• Step 4. Designing the preferences matrix based of comparing worst
criterion over all others by applying numbers between 1 and 9.
• Step 5. Finding the relative importance of criteria through calculation
of final and optimal weights (w1*,w2*,w3*,….wn*) by solving the
following optimization model.
• Step 6. Estimating the consistency ratio (Ksi) to verify the reliability
level of the pairwise comparisons using the following equation.
• A consistency index (CI), as shown in the following table helps to
determine the Ksi value.
• A smaller Ksi value (close to zero) indicates superior consistency,
whereas, a higher Ksi value (close to one) indicates inferior
consistency made during pairwise comparisons.
• CI values for BWM method.