Prepositioning of assets and supplies in disaster operations management: Review and research gap identification

Prepositioning of assets and supplies prior to a disaster strike accelerates the response activities as it reduces the supply chain burden associated with humanitarian relief items. Unlike prior survey papers on pre-disaster and post-disaster humanitarian logistics, our paper has a specific focus on prepositioning of assets and supplies in the domain of natural disasters. The first aim of our paper is to review the main Operations Research and Management Science (OR/MS) journal papers published between 2000 and 2018 on this topic. We have statistically analyzed these papers based on contributions in different journals, number of papers per year, and type of disaster. We have also categorized the papers based on their decision variables into three categories: Allocation papers (“A”), Location papers (“L”), and Location-Allocation papers (“LA”). After that, we have assessed our current literature based on some of the methodological issues in Humanitarian Operations that gathered by Kovacs and Moshtari (2018). The second aim of our paper is research gap identification. Our key findings in this domain are that there is a lack of papers that: consider demand-side costs in their proposed model objectives; deal with uncertainty in funding, budget, asset and supply quantities, and infrastructure; considering prepositioning as a risk mitigation strategy; take reliability into account for reducing the risk of loss; consider prepositioning of medical staff and emergency crew; discuss the best time to start prepositioning of supplies and assets in confronting a foreseen disaster; use social media to better prepare for upcoming disasters.