APPLICABILITY OF LAST MILE HUMANITARIAN LOGISTICS OPTIMIZATION FOR NATURAL FLOOD DISASTERS: A SYSTEMATIC REVIEW

Abstract

Disaster management can be considered as a critical measurement of the ability of communities to effectively protect their people and infrastructure and rapidly recover from the disaster. In the Disaster management context, managing Humanitarian logistics plays a critical role. Where Humanitarian logistics is dealing with planning, implementing and controlling the efficient, cost effective flow of goods, materials and information from the point of origin to the point of consumption with the intention of alleviating the suffering of victims. But still most of humanitarian aids organizations lack the resources to analyze disaster related data and effectively manage logistics and rescue victims in a disaster. For any kind of disaster relief operations last mile is considered to be very critical place in humanitarian logistics management because it is the place where humanitarian aids distribution to victims is happening. When considering about global disaster context, floods can be considered as one of the most common and frequent natural disaster world population are faced. Therefore objective of this study is to analyze the applicability of last mile humanitarian logistics optimization for natural flood disasters and provide future research directions for last mile humanitarian logistics management operations in order to provide better service to victims of flood disasters and improve the performance of last mile operations.

Key words: Disasters, Humanitarian logistics management, last mile distribution, Optimization, Performance measures.

For full paper: fmscresearch@sjp.ac.lk