Designing Valid Humanitarian Logistics Scenario Sets

Literature about humanitarian logistics (HL) has developed a lot of innovative decision support systems during the last decades to support decisions such as location, routing, supply, or inventory management. Most of those contributions are based on quantitative models but, generally, are not used by practitioners who are not confident with. This can be explained by the fact that scenarios and datasets used to design and validate those HL models are often too simple compared to the real situations. In this chapter, a scenario-based approach based on a five-step methodology has been developed to bridge this gap by designing a set of valid scenarios able to assess disaster needs in regions subject to recurrent disasters. The contribution, usable by both scholars and practitioners, demonstrates that defining such valid scenario sets is possible for recurrent disasters. Finally, the proposal is validated on a concrete application case based on Peruvian recurrent flood and earthquake disasters.