Multi-Period Donation Allocation for Food Banks under Stochastic Capacity and Supply
Abstract
Each food bank within the national Feeding America network faces the challenge of distributing donated food equitably across the food-insecure population it serves while minimizing food storage and waste over a multi-period planning horizon. Donated food supply is highly stochastic, and distribution to beneficiaries is done by autonomous local agencies whose capacities are uncertain and vary over time. Based on our long-standing partnership with a regional food bank in the southeastern United States, we address the equitable and effective distribution of food donations to charitable agencies over a finite planning horizon under uncertain capacity and supply. We derive structural properties of this problem and use them to develop efficient heuristics. An extensive numerical study evaluates the performance of the heuristics relative to a stochastic dynamic programming benchmark, which suffers from the curse of dimensionality. One heuristic consistently provides near-optimal solutions and can be easily implemented by food banks. Our results also apply to other problems involving the equitable and effective distribution of scarce resources under stochastic capacity and supply.
Related
- Open Capacity Pooling in Agentic Supply Chains: Coordination-Directed LLM Discovery and Distributed Re-optimization
- On a fair and risk-averse urban air mobility resource allocation problem under demand and capacity uncertainties
- Distributed Stochastic Extremum Seeking for Optimal Resource Allocation over Networks with Time Delays
- Online Stochastic Allocation with Increasing Returns
- Unifying Transforms for Singular Cauchy Problems in Quantum Logistics, Supply Chain Resilience, and Energy Systems
BibTeX
@misc{orgut2026multiperiod,
title = {{Multi-Period Donation Allocation for Food Banks under Stochastic Capacity and Supply}},
author = {Irem Sengul Orgut and Julie S. Ivy and Reha Uzsoy and James Wilson},
howpublished = {arXiv},
year = {2026},
month = nov,
doi = {10.48550/arxiv.2611.01947},
eprint = {2611.01947},
archivePrefix = {arXiv},
url = {https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.01947},
}
RIS
TY - UNPB
TI - Multi-Period Donation Allocation for Food Banks under Stochastic Capacity and Supply
AU - Irem Sengul Orgut
AU - Julie S. Ivy
AU - Reha Uzsoy
AU - James Wilson
PY - 2026
DA - 2026/11/01
PB - arXiv
DO - 10.48550/arxiv.2611.01947
UR - https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.01947
AB - Each food bank within the national Feeding America network faces the challenge of distributing donated food equitably across the food-insecure population it serves while minimizing food storage and waste over a multi-period planning horizon. Donated food supply is highly stochastic, and distribution to beneficiaries is done by autonomous local agencies whose capacities are uncertain and vary over time. Based on our long-standing partnership with a regional food bank in the southeastern United States, we address the equitable and effective distribution of food donations to charitable agencies over a finite planning horizon under uncertain capacity and supply. We derive structural properties of this problem and use them to develop efficient heuristics. An extensive numerical study evaluates the performance of the heuristics relative to a stochastic dynamic programming benchmark, which suffers from the curse of dimensionality. One heuristic consistently provides near-optimal solutions and can be easily implemented by food banks. Our results also apply to other problems involving the equitable and effective distribution of scarce resources under stochastic capacity and supply.
ER -