Humanitarian Supply Chain Management - An Overview

Abstract

Disasters recently received the attention of the Operations Research community due to the great potential of improving disaster related operations through the use of analytical tools, and the impact on people that this implies. In this introductory article, we describe the main characteristics of disaster supply chains, and we highlight the particular issues that are faced when managing these supply chains. We illustrate how Operations Research tools can be used to make better decisions, taking debris management operations as an example, and discuss potential general research directions in this area.