Humanitarian logistics

In many complex emergencies, the humanitarian relief problem evolves quickly and unpredictably. There are usually significant life-and-death consequences associated with inadequate relief supplies. The associated locations may have poor infrastructure and poor telecommunications, and have political constraints. In such environments, effective supply chains can significantly increase the odds of success. The overall goal of the humanitarian logistics activity is to restore the capability of the system, at least to the level prior to the catastrophe, and leave development to other entities. 

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While Chapter 5 assumes coordination to be a good thing to do, there are contexts in which no coordination is assumed to be best. Some of these examples appear in the context of humanitarian logistics and arise primarily due to different mandates across participating entities. 

Iyer, A.V., and Wassenhove, L.N. A Framework for Humanitarian Logistics Coordination. Working paper, Krannert School of Management, Purdue University, July 2003. 

Keywords Humanitarian logistics Facility location Relief network Disaster... 

The disaster relief environment gives additional complexity to humanitarian logistics comparing to business logistics as follows (Balcik and Beamon 2008) ... 

Keywords Facility location Stochastic Humanitarian logistics Disaster relief... 

Multi-Criteria Network Design in Health and Humanitarian Logistics... 

Within the applications of health and humanitarian logistics, there are often multiple conflicting objectives or criteria that are important to the decision makers. Examples include designing a logistics network that serves the maximum number of people, responds in the shortest time possible, and targets those in need. There may also be objectives that are unique to health and... 

In this section, we discuss the multiple objective mathematical programming formulations and results for network design optimization in health and humanitarian logistics. 

Humanitarian Logistics Network Design—Military Aerial Delivery Operations... 

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