OR/MS Models for the Humanitarian-Business Partnership

Disasters are expected to increase significantly over the next decades. In the recent years, disasters have killed thousands of people, affected millions of lives, and caused billions of economic damages worldwide. It has been estimated that over 80% of relief operations’ budget dedicates to logistics operations. Although the humanitarian logistics is in the spotlight as a practice and a research topic, the inefficiency of the relief operations is still observed in different cases. The main reason of this inefficiency might be related to the lack of available resources for the humanitarian organizations (HOs). The shortage of resources comprises the lack of emergency supplies as well as logistical facilities, information, and technologies. A well-organized humanitarian-business partnership can compensate most of these shortcomings by using the business sector’s logistical capabilities. The main focus of this book chapter is providing an overview on the partnership of HOs with business sector to enhance the relief operations at the onset of disasters. Therefore, in this chapter, we present some basics about humanitarian logistics and its related challenges. Moreover, a gap analysis is performed through reviewing those research studies which have applied Operations Research/Management Science (OR/MS) models and discovered advances in humanitarian-business partnership. Then, we present some research avenues based on the identified gaps. A mathematical model is also developed for a specific problem in the area of humanitarian-business partnership to give some clues to the interested researchers for quantitative modeling of decision problems related to such partnerships.