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Artificial Intelligence, Robotics and Autonomous Systems in SCM
Published in Turan Paksoy, Çiğdem Koçhan, Sadia Samar Ali, Logistics 4.0, 2020
Drones, commonly known as unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), are electronic devices that are capable of sustained flight without any human operator on board. Drones perform useful actions under sufficient control such as the delivery of small items that are urgently needed in areas that are not easily accessible. Drone delivery has been applied to healthcare and humanitarian logistics areas in recent years. For instance, delivery of urgently needed medications, blood, and vaccines at the right time when land transport is challenging due to the poor transportation infrastructure, traffic congestion, or severe natural conditions (e.g., weather or disasters). Drones are useful when human lives are in danger. For instance, drones helped rescue teams to pinpoint the survivors after the Nepal earthquake in 2015 (Scott and Scott 2017).
City logistics in Asia
Published in Junyi Zhang, Cheng-Min Feng, Routledge Handbook of Transport in Asia, 2018
Eiichi Taniguchi, Ali Gul Qureshi
In Asia, catastrophic disasters have occurred in recent years, including the Northern Sumatra earthquake in the Indian Sea region in 2004; the Sichuan earthquake in China in 2008; the Great Tohoku Earthquake in Japan in 2011; flooding in Thailand in 2011; and flooding in Bangladesh in 2012. After these disasters, problems in delivering relief supplies to affected people in shelters or at home were reported (Taniguchi and Thompson, 2013; Holguín-Veras et al., 2014b; Das and Hanaoka, 2014; Liberatore et al., 2014). This type of distribution of goods is named humanitarian logistics. Humanitarian logistics are important for saving lives of people affected by disasters, and to accelerate the recovery of communities. Preparedness of planning humanitarian logistics in advance is required to effectively deliver relief supplies to shelters. Collaboration among the various stakeholders, including the public sector and private companies, is crucial for successful operations. Advanced ICT will be helpful for identifying the needs of people in shelters and dispatching freight vehicles efficiently and effectively. Humanitarian logistics are similar to city logistics in terms of total optimisation of logistics activities, but while city logistics aim to reduce negative environmental and safety effects and minimise costs, humanitarian logistics in emergency conditions must try to reduce the suffering of affected people while providing logistics services at reasonable costs.
Prepositioning disaster relief supplies using robust optimization
Published in IISE Transactions, 2020
German A. Velasquez, Maria E. Mayorga, Osman Y. Özaltın
In the context of humanitarian logistics inventory prepositioning refers to strategically locating relief supplies in anticipation of disasters (Galindo and Batta, 2013). Such preparedness strategies improve the effectiveness of disaster response in terms of time and resources required to mitigate the urgent need for relief items in affected populations (Van Wassenhove, 2006). Implementing efficient and cost-effective disaster preparedness strategies has become more pressing given the steady increase in funding deficit for humanitarian aid. According to the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA), as of August 2018, 38 000 000 people across the world—the equivalent of the population of California—have not secured humanitarian assistance due to funding shortages (OCHA, 2018). Moreover, trends show that the situation is deteriorating; the funding deficit has increased over the years reaching an all-time record high of 50% between 2015 and 2017.
An inventory management approximation for estimating aggregated regional food stock levels
Published in International Journal of Production Research, 2020
Ole Hansen, Hanno Friedrich, Sandra Transchel
Natural disasters worldwide are leading to the loss of human lives and serious financial damage. Consequently, disaster management has become more important over the last decades. Disaster management includes four phases – mitigation, preparedness, response and recovery – with the former two phases occurring before a disaster and the latter two afterwards (Altay and Green 2006). Before a disaster occurs, the pre-positioning of inventory and capacities is a typical measure examined by researchers and practitioners. Although humanitarian logistics differ from commercial logistics in many respects (see, e.g. Balcik and Beamon 2008), the goal of inventory management in humanitarian logistics is to answer the basic questions of storage (when/where/how much to store) (Balcik, Bozkir, and Kundakcioglu 2016).
Measuring and improving the impact of humanitarian logistics consulting
Published in Production Planning & Control, 2021
Stephan M. Wagner, Bublu Thakur-Weigold, Federico Gatti, Jonas Stumpf
The logistics system, which must balance customer service levels with cost, is roughly comprised of the functional stages from supply to the final customer, between which information, material, and financial resources flow. Thomas and Kopczak (2005, 2) define humanitarian logistics as ‘… the process of planning, implementing and controlling the efficient, cost-effective flow and storage of goods and materials, as well as related information, from the point of origin to the point of consumption for the purpose of alleviating the suffering of vulnerable people’. Organisations in humanitarian supply chains share similar nodes and must manage costs within donor-defined budgets, without pursuing profit (Beamon and Balcik 2008; Van der Laan, De Brito, and Vergunst 2009) (Figure 2).