Design of experiments in humanitarian logistics: facility decision making in disaster preparedness

Facility planning is one of the critical decisions faced by humanitarian managers. Some managerial implications have been offered in the literature, but these are commonly derived from simple sensitivity analyses on individual instance characteristics and/or using a single case study, and as such can be misleading as they ignore important interactions between many disaster properties. We carried out a large experimental study that analyses the influence of different factors and their interactions on the choice of facility configuration for inventory pre-positioning in preparation for emergencies. On the one hand, the outcomes of the study provide insights on the effect of the most important factor interactions on the facility decision-making. On the other hand, the findings also demonstrate that the simple analyses might provide guidelines that are not robust across different disasters, and as such promote better experimental designs in the field of humanitarian logistics.