Each year, about 500 natural disasters kill approximately 70,000 people and affect more than 200 million people worldwide. In the aftermath of such events, large quantities of supplies are needed to provide relief aid to the affected. CARE International is one of the largest humanitarian organizations that provide relief aid to disaster survivors. The most vital issues in disaster response are agility in mobilizing supplies and effectiveness in distributing them. To improve disaster response, a research group from Georgia Institute of Technology collaborated with CARE to develop a model to evaluate the effect that pre-positioning relief items would have on CARE's average relief-aid emergency response time. The model's results helped CARE managers to determine a desired configuration for the organization's pre-positioning network. Based on the results of our study and other factors, CARE has pre-positioned relief supplies in three facilities around the world.

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Large-scale disasters cause enormous damage to people living in the affected areas.Providing relief quickly to the affected is a critical issue in recovering the effects of a disaster.Pre-disaster planning has an important role on reducing the arrival time of relief items to the affected areas and efficiently allocating them. In this study, a mixed integer programming model is proposed in order to pre-position warehouses throughout a potential affected area and determine the amount of relief items to be held in those warehouses. Time between the strike of the disaster and arrival of relief items at the affected areas is aimed to be minimized. In addition, using probabilistic constraints, the model ensures that relief items arrive at affected areas within a certain time window with certain reliability. Considering instable fault lines on which Istanbul is located, the proposed model is applied to the Istanbul case for pre-positioning warehouses a priori to the possible expected large-scale earthquake.

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The increasing number of natural disasters in the last decade necessitates the increase in capacity and agility while delivering humanitarian relief. A common logistics strategy used by humanitarian organizations to respond this need is the establishment of pre-positioning warehouse networks. In the pre-positioning strategy, critical relief inventories are located near the regions at which they will be needed in advance of the onset of the disaster. Therefore, pre-positioning reduces the response time by totally or partially eliminating the procurement phase and increasing the availability of relief items just after the disaster strikes. Once the pre-positioning warehouse locations are decided and warehouses on those locations become operational, they will be in use for a long time. Therefore, the chosen locations should be robust enough to enable extensions, and to cope with changing trends in disaster types, locations and magnitudes. In this study, we analyze the effects of natural disaster trends on the expansion plan of pre-positioning warehouse network implemented by CARE International. We utilize a facility location model to identify the additional warehouse location(s) for relief items to be stored as an extension of the current warehouse network operated by CARE International, considering changing natural disaster trends observed over the past three decades.