The Nutritious Supply Chain: Optimizing Humanitarian Food Assistance

Koen Peters, Sérgio Silva, Rui Gonçalves, Mirjana Kavelj, Hein Fleuren, Dick den Hertog, Ozlem Ergun, and Mallory Freeman, The Nutritious Supply Chain: Optimizing Humanitarian Food Assistance, INFORMS Journal on Optimization, Volume 3, Issue 2, Spring 2021, Pages:200–226.

The World Food Programme (WFP) is the largest humanitarian agency fighting hunger worldwide, reaching approximately 90 million people with food assistance across 80 countries each year. To deal with the operational complexities inherent in its mandate, WFP has been developing tools to assist its decision makers with integrating supply chain decisions across departments and functional areas. This paper describes a mixed integer linear programming model that simultaneously optimizes the food basket to be delivered, the sourcing plan, the delivery plan, and the transfer modality of a long-term recovery operation for each month in a predefined time horizon. By connecting traditional supply chain elements to nutritional objectives, we are able to make significant breakthroughs in the operational excellence of WFP’s most complex operations. We show three examples of how the optimization model is used to support operations: (1) to reduce the operational costs in Iraq by 12% without compromising the nutritional value supplied, (2) to manage the scaling-up of the Yemen operation from three to six million beneficiaries, and (3) to identify sourcing strategies during the El Niño drought of 2016.

Research Questions

The literature survey highlights several challenges and research gaps. In particular, we find

a. Long-term humanitarian assistance has received little attention.

b. Most papers focus on subproblems (e.g., facility location).

c. Alternative transfer modalities (e.g., cash, vouchers) have not been addressed yet.

d. There is a lack of models that are actually being implemented (e.g., because of data challenges). 

Objective and Goals

Conventional network flow models usually revolve around profit maximization or cost minimization, but for humanitarian operations, there are often additional considerations. We refer to Holgu´ın-Veras et al. (2013) for a comprehensive treatise on this subject.

In this paper, we consider four main classes of objectives:

1. Efficiency relates to resource utilization and covers objectives such as the cost of the operation and the utilization of port capacity.

2. Effectiveness relates to the nutritional impact of WFP’s assistance and covers objectives such as the remaining nutrient gap and the dietary diversity score.

3. Development relates to the impact on the local economy and covers objectives such as the dollars spent on local procurement and CBT assistance.

4. Agility relates to the responsiveness of the solution and covers objectives such as the maximum and average lead time of the supply chain.