Search results for "humanitarian logistics"
showing 10 items of 15 documents
Understanding the Health Disaster: Research Design for the Response to the 2014 West African Ebola Outbreak
2015
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…
Understanding Decision Support in Large-Scale Disasters: Challenges in Humanitarian Logistics Distribution
2017
Disasters are characterized by conflicting, uncertain, or lacking data. Nevertheless, humanitarian responders need to make rapid decisions. This is particularly true for the immediate response to a sudden onset disaster. Since most humanitarian decision support systems (DSS) make important assumptions on data availability and quality that are often not fulfilled in practice, decision-makers are largely left to their experience. In this paper, we identify three major challenges for an operational DSS to support distribution planning: (i) deep uncertainty; (ii) reflecting field conditions and constraints; and (iii) rapid humanitarian logistics modeling. We review the relevant theories and pro…
Managing in-country transportation risks in humanitarian supply chains by logistics service providers: Insights from the 2015 Nepal earthquake
2017
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…
Requirements for Relief Distribution Decision-Making in Humanitarian Logistics
2020
Making efficient and effective decisions in the chaotic environment of humanitarian relief distribution (HRD) is challenging. Decision-makers need to concentrate on numerous decision factors categorized into decision objectives, variables, and constraints. Recent HRD literature focuses on optimizing procedures while neglecting the quantification of essential requirements (decision factors) for information systems to provide decision-making support. In this article, we address this gap by accumulating affecting decision factors from both literature and practice. We investigated the practical implications of these factors in HRD decision-making by measuring the preferences of a Delphi panel c…
City logistics – A Strategic Element of Sustainable Urban Development
2016
Abstract The main purpose of this article is to present the basic development trends in the logistics area of the city, some concept of sustainable logistics and innovative technologies prerequisites to its implementation. The author shows such intelligent technologies as e.g. intelligent traffic control, modular containers, which help to improve utilization of vehicle capacity, and alternative means of transport. This will help to reduce the load on the road infrastructure, thus improving the quality of the environment and life in the city. The main trend in sustainable city logistics is cooperation between suppliers, customers and the public administration. Implementation of intelligent l…
A methodology for developing evidence-based optimization models in humanitarian logistics
2022
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 …
Marketing and Logistics Cooperation Problems in Latvian Companies
2014
Abstract The given article analyses the discrepancies in the tasks of marketing and logistics and cooperation problems between these two areas within a company, as well as defines the role of these disciplines in the common system of business management. The authors point out the necessity of effective cooperation of marketing and logistic resulting in efficiency growth of the company and in improvement of competitiveness by means of collaboration synergy. Authors propose the results of the inquiry carried out in Latvian companies, revealing the most popular models of integration of marketing and logistics within the company and main cooperation problems between the departments of marketing…
An Information System Design Product Theory for Integrated Order, Transportation and Warehouse Management Systems
2013
Globalization, lead time reduction and cost pressures, and other factors make it nontrivial for most companies to devise and manage effective logistics services to meet client requirements. They are better off using the services of specialized third party logistics service providers. These providers compete fiercely and need to develop and improve their services continuously to gain competitive advantage. Integrating the logistics process for improving communication and coordination is the most feasible way for third party logistics providers to deal with these pressures. Yet, the extant literature provides little theoretical guidance for integrating the logistics life-cycle, including orde…
Supporting group decision makers to locate temporary relief distribution centres after sudden-onset disasters
2020
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
2015
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…