A food distribution model for famine relief

Many of the problems encountered by the urgency of need to deliver food to famine relief area arose further complicated distribution problems because there were neither inventory systems in place nor plans for transporting goods to these regions. This study develops an effective distribution model for determining optimal patterns of food supply and inventory allocation for famine relief area. This research addresses the formulation of those complex vehicle routing problems incorporating inventory allocation and optimal distribution based on minimizing the amount of pains and starving instead of travel distance or time. Also, we have developed computer programs for each step of approaches and have shown the results of sample run for North Korea famine relief problem. It was known that the proposed model was a very acceptable for the inventory allocation and vehicle routing problems. (C) 1999 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.