Analyzing the Effectiveness of Logistics Networks During the Immediate Response Phase of Three Different Natural Disasters
Abstract
Every year, natural disasters affect millions of people around the world. Natural disasters are an unavoidable part of our lives but effective disaster management increases the number of survivors and helps the victims. After disaster hits, the most important job is enabling an effective response operation. This operation involves many logistics activities and some special demand for relief goods. Today, supply chain management increases the effectiveness of logistics activities for many companies. The same thinking and modeling may help increase the effectiveness of response operations. An important milestone for this achievement is to be able to evaluate the performance of response operations in system thinking. In this project, we introduced three theoretical performance metrics: demand and supply equilibrium, transportation utilization, and information sharing, which help analyze the performance of overall response operations. We chose three different types of natural disasters: Hurricane Katrina, the 2004 Asian Tsunami, and the 2010 Haiti Earthquake to show the usefulness and applicability of these metrics. Unavailability of data associated with logistics operations made a thorough analysis impossible, but we assessed each disaster according to our metrics. The last part of this project focuses on the managerial implications of response operations considering these three metrics.
Document Details
- Document Type
- Technical Report
- Publication Date
- Dec 01, 2010
- Accession Number
- ADA536324
Entities
People
- Ilyas E. Gursoy
- Mohamed T. Brahim
- Osman Onder
Organizations
- Naval Postgraduate School