Dynamic relief-demand management for emergency logistics operations under large-scale disasters

This paper presents a dynamic relief-demand management model for emergency logistics operations under imperfect information conditions in large-scale natural disasters. The proposed methodology consists of three steps: (1) data fusion to forecast relief demand in multiple areas, (2) fuzzy clustering to classify affected area into groups, and (3) multi-criteria decision making to rank the order of priority of groups. The results of tests accounting for different experimental scenarios indicate that the overall forecast errors are lower than 10% inferring the proposed method’s capability of dynamic relief-demand forecasting and allocation with imperfect information to facilitate emergency logistics operations.