1. University of Arkansas
Arkansas Newswire
Expert in Humanitarian Logistics to Visit Campus This
Friday
Tuesday, November 11, 2014
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.
Keywords: Engineering (http://www.uark.edu/Articles/Archive/?topic=engineering) Lectures
(http://www.uark.edu/Articles/Archive/?topic=lectures) Events (http://www.uark.edu/Articles/Archive/?
topic=events)
Contacts:

2. Katie Chevrier, communications intern
College of Engineering
479-575-5697, engrcomm@uark.edu (mailto:engrcomm@uark.edu)
Camilla Shumaker, director of communications
College of Engineering
479-575-5697, camillas@uark.edu (mailto:camillas@uark.edu)
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