Timely and accurate processing of crisis information and effective communication have been documented as critical elements of disaster relief operations. Despite the lessons learned from previous crises, preparing information for humanitarian assistance and ineffective information sharing remain a recurring and almost impossible task for relief agencies. The purpose of this paper is to propose ...

The Andean Information System for Disaster Prevention and Relief – SIAPAD (as it is called in Spanish) is an Andean Committee for Disaster Risk Prevention and Relief (CAPRADE ) initiative oriented to provide tools for data and information discovery, visualization and to facilitate access to the data available in the different technical organizations of Andean countries participating in the init...

History has shown that local, state, and federal governments are not well-equipped with the flexible and responsive abilities necessary to manage the short supply chain life-cycle inherent in providing appropriate disaster relief resources in a timely fashion. Unfortunately, in these unique situations these inefficiencies can cause considerable harm to the citizenry, the financial economy, and ...

Humanitarian relief is a key operation after a disaster for people who are isolated in disaster-affected areas and cannot get basic supplies for daily living. Because the demand can be large and unexpected, an efficient humanitarian relief logistics planning becomes extremely important. In a recent paper, Lin et al. (2009) proposed a logistics model for disaster relief operations. In this paper...

The effective and efficient distribution of relief goods is a key challenge in disaster management. Typically, adhoc supply networks (SNs) need to be built, in which various actors with different interests collaborate. Although information is sparse and highly uncertain, time for SN design is short, and important strategic decisions (e.g., location of facilities), whose revision requires invest...

This community based participatory research study was conducted in Oso, WA. Ten survivors of the 2014 mudslide participated in a focus group and discussed their experiences before and after this natural disaster. Findings revealed that the majority of participants had feelings of confusion/redundancy and were still processing feelings of grief and loss at the time of the focus group. Another fi...

The second approach is to use epidemiologic methods to investigate mechanisms for alleviating the burden of a disaster once it occurs. This may be applied at the stage of disaster preparedness or at the stage of disaster relief. The most direct applicat ion of epidemiology in this situation is the establishment of surveillance systems to identify injuries and the possible emergence of communica...

The optimization problem of relief supplies distribution for large-scale emergencies is discussed in this paper. Under the situation that the needs for relief supplies are more numerous and urgency, the optimization goal should be minimum disaster loss instead of minimum delivery cost or shortest travel distance. By setting objective function about minimum disaster loss, scheduling model of rel...

In this paper, a tour-based multi-objective logistics model for optimized scheduling of the delivery of critical items in a disaster relief operation is proposed. Our model considers multi-items, multi-vehicles, multi-periods, and a split delivery scenario in a disaster. Two heuristic approaches are introduced to solve the logistics problem. In the first approach, a genetic algorithm is applied...