The 2011 Great East Japan Earthquake caused a wide range of problems, and as countermeasures, many aid activities were carried out. Many of these problems and aid activities were reported via Twitter. However, most problem reports and corresponding aid messages were not successfully exchanged between victims and local governments or humanitarian organizations, overwhelmed by the vast amount of ...

This chapter focuses on an auction-based procurement framework for single coordinating platforms in humanitarian logistics. It first covers disaster relief operations, humanitarian logistics, and procurement in this context and illustrate many of the issues that make the management and coordination of procurement functions complex and challenging. Then the proposed framework along with the auct...

_ Nyagudi Musandu (Independent Researcher, Nairobi, KENYA – EAST AFRICA) Abstract: With the deployment of lethal autonomous weapons, there is the requirement that any such platform complies with the precepts of International Humanitarian Law. Humanitarian Algorithms[9: p. 9] ensure that lethal autonomous weapon systems perform military/security operations, within the confines of International H...

Humanitarian demining is still a highly laborintensive and high-risk operation. Advanced sensors and mechanical aids can significantly reduce the demining time. In this context, it is the aim to develop a humanitarian demining mobile robot which is able to scan semi-automatically a minefield. This paper discusses the development of a control scheme for such a semi-autonomous mobile robot for hu...

Differential evolution (DE) is a population-based stochastic search algorithm which has shown a good performance in solving many benchmarks and real-world optimization problems. Individuals in the standard DE, and most of its modifications, exhibit the same search characteristics because of the use of the same DE scheme. This paper proposes a simple and effective heterogeneous DE (HDE) to balan...

This article looks at the tension between principles and politics in the response to the Afghan crisis, and more specifically at the extent to which humanitarian agencies have been able to protect themselves and their activities from overt instrumentalization by those pursuing partisan political agendas. After a short historical introduction, it focuses on the tensions around the issue of ‘cohe...

Humanitarian supply chain management has attracted research attention in the recent years. In this paper, an attempt is made to review the status of leading published literature in humanitarian logistics and supply chain management. A literature classification scheme is suggested. The reviewed journals are classified according to research publication, publication year, topics and research metho...