Facility location in humanitarian relief: a review

Abstract

Humanitarian logistics and supply chain management have emerged as areas of research interest in the last decade, owing to increased frequencies and impacts of disasters. Facility location decisions are critical to the success of any humanitarian relief effort and thus have found significant attention from researchers and practitioners. This study aims to present current practices, trends and developments in facility location research. They are then used to identify and recommend areas for future research. A systematic review of existing literature is carried out over a period of 11 years (2005-2015) by classifying it exhaustively on basis of several dimensions such as disaster types, speed of occurrence, methodology adopted, model structure, objective functions, constraints and solution techniques. The literature is also categorised according to year of publication and journals. The paper establishes an agenda for future research in facility location domain of humanitarian logistics using an operational research perspective.