Geospatial site suitability modeling for US department of defense humanitarian assistance projects

The purpose of this paper is to outline the requirement for data-driven methods for determining optimal geographic locations of United States Department of Defense (DOD) Humanitarian Assistance (HA) resources, including disaster mitigation and preparedness projects. HA project managers and tactical implementers charged with cost-efficient deployment of HA resources are challenged to produce measurable effects, in addition to contributing to broader Joint and Interagency-informed security assistance strategies. To address these issues, our ongoing research advocates geospatial multi-criteria site suitability decision support capabilities that leverage 1) existing geospatial resource location-allocation methodology as applied in government, retail, and commercial sectors; 2) user-generated criteria and objective preferences applied in widely-used decision frameworks; 3) assessments of the feasibility of obtaining data at a geographic scale where DOD tactical/operational level users can benefit from the model outputs; and 4) social science theory related to the HA domain criteria that form the foundation of potential decision models.