Abstract:

A new disaster to humanity, called Coronavirus Disease (COVID-19), arose in and spread to worldwide at late December 2019. The most developed countries are affected from this pandemic more. However, the situation is more complex in some countries that are witnessed/witnessing a conflict, as in Syria. In Syria, the conflict continues more than 9 years and within the country there are more than 6 million internally displaced people (IDPs). This situation signifies millions of people living in hard conditions and seeking healthcare service, sheltering, food, safety and other related vital needs. In this context, since during a pandemic supplies and aid kits need to be stockpiled in a humanitarian relief warehouse to be protected and then distributed effectively to the most pandemic-affected people, we focused on the location research of relief warehouses in this study. We evaluated the locations of the relief warehouses to determine the most appropriate location based on a scientific humanitarian aid-based hybrid methodology. This novel methodology is implemented to a real case study in north of Aleppo/Syria. For this aim, firstly, data is collected directly from the target area; then humanitarian and economic criteria are selected by three experts to be included in the study. Criteria weights are computed by the Fuzzy Analytic Hierarchy Process (F-AHP). Finally, MULTIMOORA technique as a Multi Criteria Decision Making (MCDM) method is applied to assess the candidate warehouses and rank them. The proposed methodology showed its efficiency and effectiveness in evaluating relief warehouses and it can be utilized to facilitate the decision-making process. As a result, the suffering of the disaster-affected people can be reduced and high efficiency from donations in the target area can be achieved.