Emergency Logistics in a Large-Scale Disaster Context: Achievements and Challenges

Abstract

There is growing research interest in emergency logistics within the operations research (OR) community. Different from normal business operations, emergency response for large scale disasters is very complex and there are many challenges to deal with. Research on emergency logistics is still in its infancy stage. Understanding the challenges and new research directions is very important. In this paper, we present a literature review of emergency logistics in the context of large-scale disasters. The main contributions of our study include three aspects: First, we identify key characteristics of large-scale disasters and assess their challenges to emergency logistics. Second, we analyze and summarize the current literature on how to deal with these challenges. Finally, we discuss existing gaps in the relevant research and suggest future research directions.