Humanitarian logistics and emergency relief management: hot perspectives and its optimization approach

Abstract

Post-disaster humanitarian relief is full of importance, complexity and difficulty, which makes people pay more attentions to various disaster relief measures and emergency management practices related to disaster preventions and reductions. The main purpose of humanitarian relief is to protect the lives of the victims in the affected areas and provide victims with the indispensable relief materials to survive from the unexpected disaster. Therefore, this paper puts its focus on some key decisions raised in the process of post-disaster humanitarian relief activities and summarizes the state-of-the-art researches in the area of critical emergency facility location, relief material allocation, emergency vehicle routing and the incorporation of the interests of the victims in the modeling framework. Specifically, through the analysis, this paper draws some key questions that can be further explored in the current research, in order to lay the foundation for the follow-up research, and can better serve the emergency rescue transportation practice under disaster conditions.