Understanding the Health Disaster: Research Design for the Response to the 2014 West African Ebola Outbreak
International audience; The 2014 Ebola outbreak in West Africa is the largest ever in history, affecting multiple countries and to this date, the World Health Organization has registered more than 6,500 deaths attributed to Ebola. The challenges arising from this outbreak to responders worldwide do not follow the standard characterisation or response patterns of natural sudden onset vs. conflict disasters. Rather, it is a medical emergency, which is intertwined with multiple challenges in the sectors decision-making, coordination, logistics and information management. In this paper, we present our research framework, which is based on desk research and initial interviews with responders. Th…
Special Issue on Innovative Artificial Intelligence Solutions for Crisis Management
International audience
Managing in-country transportation risks in humanitarian supply chains by logistics service providers: Insights from the 2015 Nepal earthquake
International audience; Humanitarian supply chains (HSCs) play a central role in effective and efficient disaster relief operations. Transportation has a critical share in HSCs and managing its risks helps to avoid further disruptions in relief operations. However, there is no common approach to or culture of risk management that its applicability has been studied through recent cases. This paper incorporates an empirical research design and makes a threefold contribution: first, it identifies in-country transportation risks during Nepal response. Second, we evaluate afore identified risks through an expert driven risk assessment grid. Third, we use our field data to study how some humanita…
Structuring Humanitarian Supply Chain Knowledge Through a Meta-Modeling Approach
To develop decision support systems (DSS) that improve humanitarian supply chain (HSC) performance, there is a need for methods that support on field data gathering and knowledge structure. We propose a meta-model to structure the knowledge of HSC and to obtain a shared vision of the HSC. It has been developed to provide a framework to class gathered data by connecting it to HSC concepts. The meta-model includes four packages, defining the collaborative ecosystem (context, actors, objectives, and behavior). The concepts gathered during our field research experiences, added to the HSC core literature, have permitted to build the HSC meta-model layer. Models built from this meta-model can be …
A methodology for developing evidence-based optimization models in humanitarian logistics
AbstractThe growing need for humanitarian assistance has inspired an increasing amount of academic publications in the field of humanitarian logistics. Over the past two decades, the humanitarian logistics literature has developed a powerful toolbox of standardized problem formulations to address problems ranging from distribution to scheduling or locations planning. At the same time, the humanitarian field is quickly evolving, and problem formulations heavily rely on the context, leading to calls for more evidence-based research. While mixed methods research designs provide a promising avenue to embed research in the reality of the field, there is a lack of rigorous mixed methods research …
Supporting group decision makers to locate temporary relief distribution centres after sudden-onset disasters
International audience; In the humanitarian response, multiple decision-makers (DMs) need to collaborate in various problems, such as locating temporary relief distribution centres (RDCs). Several studies have argued that maximising demand coverage, reducing logistics costs and minimising response time are among the critical objectives when locating RDCs after a sudden-onset disaster. However, these objectives are often conflicting and the trade-offs can considerably complicate the situation for finding a consensus.To address the challenge and support the DMs, we suggest investigating the stability of non-dominated alternatives derived from a multi-objective model based on Monte Carlo Simul…
On the Literature Divergences of the Humanitarian Supply Chain
International audience; The field of humanitarian logistics has evolved rapidly over the past decade, drawing on contributions from the areas of operations research, business engineering, supply chain management, information systems, and computer sciences. Even more varied are the specific problems that are modeled and addressed, ranging monitoring of the supply chain as a whole to decision support for specific sourcing or distribution decisions. While recently, few studies have presented taxonomies and identified research gaps, there is to this date not yet a clear understanding of how the different methodologies and domains shall be combined to achieve a consistent mix of methods and tool…
Defining and measuring the network flexibility of humanitarian supply chains: insights from the 2015 Nepal earthquake
International audience; The efficient and effective response to disasters critically depends on humanitarian supply chains (HSCs). HSCs need to be flexible to adapt to uncertainties in needs, infrastructure conditions, and behavior of other organizations. The concept of ‘network flexibility’ is, however, not clearly defined. The lack of an unanimous definition has led to a lack of consistent understanding and comparisons. This paper makes a threefold contribution: first, it defines the concept of network flexibility for HSC in the context of sudden onset disasters. Second, it proposes a framework to measure network flexibility in HSCs. Third, we apply our framework to the 2015 Nepal earthqu…
Developing a framework for designing humanitarian blockchain projects
International audience; Blockchain technology promises to improve the efficiency, transparency, and accountability of humanitarian operations. Yet at the same time, especially the humanitarian context with its characteristic volatility poses unique challenges to any technology. Most prominent are the humanitarian principles that are fundamental to humanitarian operations. These ethical principles are set to protect the most vulnerable populations. Designing blockchain projects in the humanitarian context therefore requires a systematic framework that helps humanitarians make critical choices.While some design instructions can be found for commercial applications, the humanitarian context re…
Bi-objective multi-layer location–allocation model for the immediate aftermath of sudden-onset disasters
International audience; Locating distribution centers is critical for humanitarians in the immediate aftermath of a sudden-onset disaster. A major challenge lies in balancing the complexity and uncertainty of the problem with time and resource constraints. To address this problem, we propose a location–allocation model that divides the topography of affected areas into multiple layers; considers constrained number and capacity of facilities and fleets; and allows decision-makers to explore trade-offs between response time and logistics costs. To illustrate our theoretical work, we apply the model to a real dataset from the 2015 Nepal earthquake response. For this case, our method results in…