01154441

Component

Humanitarian relief is a key operation after a disaster for people who are isolated in disaster-affected areas and cannot get basic supplies for daily living. Because the demand can be large and unexpected, an efficient humanitarian relief logistics planning becomes extremely important. In a recent paper, Lin et al. (2009) proposed a logistics model for disaster relief operations. In this paper the authors demonstrate how to apply their model to a case study. The scenario that the authors have selected is that of an earthquake disaster in Southern California simulated using the HAZUS-MH software. A series of sensitivity analyses is conducted in the paper to provide insights on the influence of various parameter settings to the performance of a disaster relief operation – specifically the authors study the impact of the depot location, the number of vehicles, and the number of clusters chosen. For the simulated earthquake disaster, the analysis shows that geographic location for the depot is important, increasing the number of vehicles does improve the performance, and that reduction in the number of clusters does not guarantee an improvement in the logistics of humanitarian relief.

01147878

10-2323

English

2010

Transportation Research Board 89th Annual Meeting

DVD

Figures; Maps; References (14)

Disaster relief; Disasters and emergency operations; Earthquake engineering; Earthquake resistant structures; Highway operations; Logistics; Simulation

Humanitarian assistance

Southern California

Highways; Planning and Forecasting; Public Transportation; Security and Emergencies; I72: Traffic and Transport Planning

Transportation Research Board Annual Meeting 2010 Paper #10-2323

TRIS, TRB

Jan 25 2010 11:04AM