OR models with stochastic components in disaster operations management: A literature survey

•We survey the applicability of OR/MS techniques in disaster operations management.•We classify recent literature based on stochastic features in their models.•We show future research directions in disaster operations management literature.•We identify the recent disaster operations management contributions to society.

The increasing number of affected people due to disasters, the complexity and unpredictability of these phenomena and the different problems encountered in the planning and response in different scenarios, establish a need to find better measures and practices in order to reduce the human and economic loss in this kind of events. However this is not an easy task considering the great uncertainty these phenomena present including the multiple number of possible scenarios in terms of location, probability of occurrence and impact, the difficulty in estimating the demand and supply, the complexity of determining the number and type of resources both available and needed and the intricacy to establish the exact location of the demand, the supply and the possible damaged infrastructure, among many others. Disaster Operations Management has become very popular and, considering the properties of disasters, the use of tools and methodologies such as OR have been given a lot of attention in recent years. The present work provides a literature review on the OR models with some stochastic component applied to Disaster Operations Management (DOM), along with an analysis of these stochastic components and the techniques used by different authors to cope with them as well as a detailed database on the consulted papers, which differentiates this research from other reviews developed during the same period, in order to give an insight on the state of the art in the topic and determine possible future research directions.