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Over the recent decades, the number of natural disasters (such as earthquakes, flood, drought, civil unrest, war, political/tribal disturbance) has dramatically increased all over the world. According to the Center for Research on the Epidemiology of the Disasters, 6.637 natural disasters occurred between 1974 and 2003 worldwide, with more than 5.1 billion affected people, 182 million homeless, 2 million deaths, and with a reported damage of $1.38 trillion USD (Ergun et al., 2009) The International Strategy for Disaster Reduction (ISDR) calculates that the global cost of natural disasters would exceed $300 billion annually by the year 2050 (European Commission, 2003). The deadliest disasters since 1900 are shown in Figure 1 (Chakravarty, 2014b).
A disaster is the result of a vast ecological breakdown in the relations between human and her/his environment (Caunhye, Nie, & Pokharel, 2012). A disaster is defined by The International Strategy for Disaster Reduction (UN/ISDR) as “a serious disruption of the functioning of society, posing a significant, widespread threat to human life, health, property or the environment, whether caused by accident, nature or human activity, and whether developing suddenly or as a result of complex, long-terms processes” (Kaynak & Tuğer, 2014). The disasters can be categorized as given Table 1 (Van Wassenhove, 2006; Pettit & Beresford, 2005).
Figure 1. The deadliest disasters since 1900 (Chakravarty, 2014b)
Table 1. | Natural | Man-Made |
Earthquake
Hurricane
Flood
Famine
Drought | Terrorist attack
Coup d’Etat
Political Crises
Refugee Crises
Civil unrest
War |
Humanitarian supply chain can be defined as the flow of supplies through the relief chain from the contributors to the consumers. Due to the escalating number of natural and man-made catastrophes, the researchers must seriously address the issue of humanitarian logistics network design to be able to respond to extreme events in time.
Humanitarian supply chain management and logistics is important research area as its effectiveness directly correlates with the quality of the humanitarian aid effort (Beamon & Kotleba, 2006; Kunz & Gold, 2015). Additionally, disasters are among the major sources of supply chain risk (Liao, Bayazit, & Wang, 2014) due to their unpredictable nature (Balakrishnan, Bowne, & Eckstein, 2008).
The cycle of disaster management consists of four main phases: mitigation, preparation, response, and recovery. The mitigation phase includes efforts to prevent the occurrence of disasters or to decrease their effects. In the preparation phase, some strategic decisions (such as number and locations of main distribution centers) are made before a disaster occurs. The response phase involves operational decisions such as vehicle routings, personnel and equipment, as well as the last mile distribution of relief goods to affected areas after the occurrence of a disaster. In the recovery phase, restoring the previous states of the affected areas is the main activity of the agents involved in disaster relief (Ahmadi, Seifi, & Tootooni, 2015).