Abstract: Adequate reserves of emergency supplies are essential for effectively responding to various emergency events. Currently, the imbalance in the allocation of physical, production capacity, and capital reserve strategies for emergency supplies in China has led to massive resource waste and difficulty in meeting the relief demands of major emergency events. However, the existing literature on mixed reserve strategies is based on exact probability distributions of demand, limiting the practical application of the models. Therefore, this paper develops a mixed reserve model for physical, production capacity, and capital under demand distribution uncertainty, aiming to minimize the government’s expected cost under extreme distributions. We derive four optimal robust reserve strategies and their boundary conditions. In addition, we establish an emergency supplies reserve model using the minimax regret criterion and derive the equivalent tractable reformulation. The key insights include: 1) As ambiguity aversion increases, the optimal production capacity and capital reserve levels remain unchanged, while the optimal physical reserve level increases. 2) The optimal physical and production capacity reserve levels are constant in the shortage-penalty cost, while the optimal capital reserve level increases with the shortage-penalty cost. 3) The optimal production capacity and capital reserve levels increase with the uncertainty of the reference distribution, while the optimal physical reserve level may decrease. The research findings enhance the flexibility and robustness of emergency supply reserve strategies and provide several managerial implications for the government.

Key words: emergency supplies, production capacity reserve, capital reserve, distributionally robust optimization, regret criterion