Expert in Humanitarian Logistics to Visit Campus This Friday

As part of the Department of Industrial Engineering Seminar Series, Marie-Eve Rancourt will give a talk titled "Tactical Network Planning for Food Aid Distribution in Kenya" on Friday, Nov. 14. Rancourt is an assistant professor of operations management at the Business School of the University of Quebec in Montreal. She is working to design an effective last-mile food aid distribution network for regions in Sub-Saharan Africa that are vulnerable to food shortages due to seasonal droughts.

At the seminar, Rancourt will present a location model to determine a set of distribution centers from which the food can be directly distributed to the beneficiaries. The model is based on the food aid distribution problem arising in the region of Garissa in Kenya, but the methodology can be applied to other locations receiving humanitarian aid. The model considers the welfare of all stakeholders involved in the regional response system: the World Food Program, the Kenya Red Cross and the beneficiaries. 

Rancourt will describe how need assessment and population data were combined to determine the food distribution requirements and show how GIS data describing the road network was used to establish a set of potential distribution centers and to evaluate transportation costs. She will present variants of the basic covering model and several comparative analyses to illustrate the trade-offs between the objectives of different stakeholders. Finally, Rancourt will discuss her future research directions. 

The seminar will be held from 11:50 a.m. until 12:50 p.m. in the Imhoff Study Center, Bell Engineering 4008.