Mathematical Models in Humanitarian Supply Chain Management: A Systematic Literature Review

Mathematical Problems in Engineering, Feb 2016

In the past decade the humanitarian supply chain (HSC) has attracted the attention of researchers due to the increasing frequency of disasters. The uncertainty in time, location, and severity of disaster during predisaster phase and poor conditions of available infrastructure during postdisaster phase make HSC operations difficult to handle. In order to overcome the difficulties during these phases, we need to assure that HSC operations are designed in an efficient manner to minimize human and economic losses. In the recent times, several mathematical optimization techniques and algorithms have been developed to increase the efficiency of HSC operations. These techniques and algorithms developed for the field of HSC motivate the need of a systematic literature review. Owing to the importance of mathematical modelling techniques, this paper presents the review of the mathematical contributions made in the last decade in the field of HSC. A systematic literature review methodology is used for this paper due to its transparent procedure. There are two objectives of this study: the first one is to conduct an up-to-date survey of mathematical models developed in HSC area and the second one is to highlight the potential research areas which require attention of the researchers.

A PDF file should load here. If you do not see its contents the file may be temporarily unavailable at the journal website or you do not have a PDF plug-in installed and enabled in your browser.

Alternatively, you can download the file locally and open with any standalone PDF reader:

http://downloads.hindawi.com/journals/mpe/2016/3212095.pdf

Mathematical Models in Humanitarian Supply Chain Management: A Systematic Literature Review

Mathematical Models in Humanitarian Supply Chain Management: A Systematic Literature Review Muhammad Salman Habib, Young Hae Lee, and Muhammad Saad Memon Department of Industrial and Management Engineering, Hanyang University, Ansan, Gyeonggi-do 15588, Republic of Korea Received 23 October 2015; Revised 13 December 2015; Accepted 29 December 2015 Academic Editor: Ivano Benedetti Copyright © 2016 Muhammad Salman Habib et al. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. Abstract In the past decade the humanitarian supply chain (HSC) has attracted the attention of researchers due to the increasing frequency of disasters. The uncertainty in time, location, and severity of disaster during predisaster phase and poor conditions of available infrastructure during postdisaster phase make HSC operations difficult to handle. In order to overcome the difficulties during these phases, we need to assure that HSC operations are designed in an efficient manner to minimize human and economic losses. In the recent times, several mathematical optimization techniques and algorithms have been developed to increase the efficiency of HSC operations. These techniques and algorithms developed for the field of HSC motivate the need of a systematic literature review. Owing to the importance of mathematical modelling techniques, this paper presents the review of the mathematical contributions made in the last decade in the field of HSC. A systematic literature review methodology is used for this paper due to its transparent procedure. There are two objectives of this study: the first one is to conduct an up-to-date survey of mathematical models developed in HSC area and the second one is to highlight the potential research areas which require attention of the researchers. 1. Introduction The humanitarian supply chain (HSC) has become an important issue for academia and professionals since the Asian tsunami which occurred in 2004. After the disaster of the 2004 tsunami in Indian Ocean, excessive relief goods blocked the airports and warehouses in the affected regions. Humanitarian relief providing agencies had to struggle a lot to sort out required goods and distribute them in timely and economic way. Before the disaster of the 2004 tsunami, the HSC was not considered as important as it is today and most of the work in the field of disaster relief before 2004 was in the context of the commercial supply chain. Usually it is thought that natural disasters are low frequency and high consequence incidents, yet there are some parts of the world that are hit by disaster several times a year. For example, Central America and the Caribbean are frequent victims of hurricanes. Similarly the central plains of USA, named as “Tornado Alley,” are repeatedly hit by a number of tornados. Japan has a long history of earthquakes because it lies in the region of tectonic plates called “the Ring of Fire.” Disasters can also be caused by human beings. Technological disasters that include chemical spill, radioactive radiation, road, air, maritime accidents, and groundwater contamination have also caused significant property damage and loss of life. Japan’s Fukushima nuclear power station failure after earthquake in 2011 and Ukraine’s Chernobyl nuclear disaster on April 26, 1986, are the examples of horrible accidents of modern human times. Even after four years the Fukushima nuclear power plant is still producing highly toxic water. Figure 1 shows that the number of disasters is increasing over the last 55 years. According to Thomas and Kopczak [1] the market for disaster relief will keep on growing due to increasing number of disasters. It is estimated that the frequency of occurrence of these disasters will increase five times in the next 50 years [2]. Keeping in view this forecast, delivering humanitarian aid can be perceived as a significant future global industry. Figure 1: Reported natural disasters between 1960 and 2015. Source: EM-DAT (the International Disaster Database). The humanitarian supply chain is defined as follows: … the process of evacuating people from disaster stricken areas to safe places and planning, implementing and controlling the efficient, cost-effective flow of goods, meanwhile collecting related information from the point of supply to the point of consumption for the purpose of alleviating the sufferings of vulnerable people. The conceptual framework of HSC is depicted in Figure 2. Figure 2: Conceptual framework of humanitarian supply chain. In the last decade, numerous studies have been published in the field of the HSC. They have addressed this topic by different titles. However, their ultimate objective is to help affected people of disaster stricken areas. One can find the research of HSC by different names like disaster relief opera (...truncated)


This is a preview of a remote PDF: http://downloads.hindawi.com/journals/mpe/2016/3212095.pdf

Muhammad Salman Habib, Young Hae Lee, Muhammad Saad Memon. Mathematical Models in Humanitarian Supply Chain Management: A Systematic Literature Review, Mathematical Problems in Engineering, 2016, 2016, DOI: 10.1155/2016/3212095