بررسی تحولات اخیر در تحقیقات پژوهش عملیاتی/علم مدیریت در مدیریت عملیات بحران

Potential consequences of disasters involve overwhelming economic losses, large affected populations and serious environmental damages. Given these devastating effects, there is an increasing interest in developing measures in order to diminish the possible impact of disasters, which gave rise to the field of disaster operations management (DOM). In this paper we review recent OR/MS research in DOM. Our work is a continuation of a previous review from Altay and Green (2006). Our purpose is to evaluate how OR/MS research in DOM has evolved in the last years and to what extent the gaps identified by Altay and Green (2006) have been covered. Our findings show no drastic changes or developments in the field of OR/MS in DOM since the publication of Altay and Green (2006). Additionally to our comparative analysis, we present an original evaluation about the most common assumptions in recent OR/MS literature in DOM. Based on our findings we provide future research directions in order to make improvements in the areas where lack of research is detected.

According to records from the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies (IFRC), 7184 disasters took place between 2000 and 2009. Some of the most memorable of these events include the World Trade Center attacks in 2001, the tsunami in Indonesia in 2004, hurricane Katrina in 2005, and the Haiti earthquake in 2010. The IFRC estimates 986,691 millions of dollars in economic damage from these events, 1,105,352 casualties, and 2,550,272,267 of affected people (IFRC, 2010). Moreover, the insurance firm Munich Re reported that in 2010 natural disaster caused more than 295,000 deaths and more than $130 billion in economic damage (Our Amazing Planet, 2010). These overwhelming statistics show the need of developing strategies in order to reduce the impact of disasters for humankind. Disaster operations, as defined by Altay and Green (2006), represent the set of activities performed before, during and after a disaster in order to diminish its impact. Many of these activities are intrinsically related to traditional OR/MS applications. For instance, location of shelters in preparation for evacuations may be addressed as a special case of location analysis; evacuation itself may be better analyzed through the application of transportation techniques; statistics and probabilistic models may be applied to deal with uncertainties related to disaster locations and demands; and in general, diverse OR/MS techniques may be applied to the different stages of disaster operations management (DOM) in order to provide a scientific approach in the process of decision making. DOM has become a highly active field in OR/MS. The amount of papers in DOM published in OR/MS main stream journals during 1990s was more than twice of the amount published during the previous decade (Altay and Green, 2006). Such popularity of DOM in OR/MS has not decreased in subsequent years. On the contrary, a great amount of research has been published after the occurrence of the World Trade Center attack in 2001 and the 2004 tsunami in the Indian Ocean (Natarajarathinam et al., 2009). As evidence of the popularity of OR/MS in DOM, it is noted that the INFORMS 2010 conference held 16 tracks—accounting for a total of 61 presentations—related to DOM. The significance of this number of tracks dedicated to DM is evident when one compares it to tracks devoted o traditional research areas. As an example, 19 tracks were dedicated to quality related issues, which is a much more traditional field in OR/MS. Another sign of continued activity are the two special issues produced by the journal Socio-Economic Planning Sciences on Disaster Planning and Logistics. Both of these special issues appeared in 2012. In this paper, we present a literature survey of recent OR/MS research in DOM. Our study covers the timeframe 2005–2010 and comprises of 155 papers. The inspiration for our work came from Altay and Green (2006) who offered a survey of OR/MS papers applied to DOM, published between 1980 and 2004. Their study provides a general picture of the state of the art of OR/MS research in DOM. In their paper, the authors offer a detailed descriptive analysis of the papers in their survey, based on a classification scheme. Altay and Green (2006) revealed several important gaps in the observed literature and suggested valuable future research directions. We started the effort towards this paper six years since the period covered by Altay and Green (2006). We believe that the popularity of OR/MS in DOM in recent years warrants the need to evaluate if the tendencies identified by Altay and Green (2006) still persist, and even more relevant, to what extent the gaps identified by them has been addressed in the recent literature. The key question here is: are OR/MS researchers developing studies to cope identified gaps in DOM? Or on the contrary, are they ignoring such gaps when defining their research subjects? Furthermore, we identify new gaps, tendencies, challenges and opportunities that are relevant for OR/MS, in order to derive thoughts about the most appropriate future research directions. We believe that by having a clearer and unified picture of the past and present of OR/MS research in DOM, as well as of its most crucial needs, OR researchers will be able to conduct related future research in a more effective way. This is especially relevant for a field like DOM due to the magnitude and nature of implications due to disasters. Our analysis is performed by classifying papers following the classification scheme proposed by Altay and Green (2006), which is based on six dimensions: authors’ affiliation, disaster type, solution methodology, operational stage, research contribution, and a final dimension based on a previous classification framework designed by Denizel et al. (2003). In addition to performing this six dimensional classification, we present an analysis about the most common assumptions in the field. To our knowledge, such an analysis of assumptions has not been performed before. Since the year 2006, there have been some recent review papers in DOM; however, none of them can be considered as an update of the work given by Altay and Green (2006). Lettieri et al. (2009) developed a systematic review of disaster management that covers the period between 1980 and 2006, in which the authors define the state of the art of disaster management in general (and not particularly from the point of view of OR/MS). Wright et al. (2006) offer a survey on OR research in disaster management whose scope is dedicated to issues related to the Department of Homeland Security (DHS). There is not any specific statement in the paper about the period surveyed, but the references go from 1969 to 2005. Natarajarathinam et al. (2009) offer a literature review on papers published before 2008 about supply chain management (SCM) in times of crisis. The scope of Natarajarathinam et al. (2009) is not limited to crisis caused by the occurrence of disaster; it also includes financial and managerial crises. Finally, in Simpson and Hancock (2009), the authors cover the period 1965–2007 with the purpose of analyzing the evolution of OR in emergency management. This latter paper includes every type of emergencies, and not only those related to disasters. Comparing our work to the papers discussed above, we conclude that our main contribution is the evaluation of the evolution of OR/MS in DOM, by contrasting the reports from Altay and Green (2006) with our findings from the recent literature. The value of this contribution is that it measures recent progress of the field and highlight future needs. The remainder of the paper is organized as follows: Section 2 discusses the search process and the boundaries for our survey. Section 3 presents an analysis of the papers in our collection based on the classification framework proposed in Altay and Green (2006). Section 4 offers future research directions and discusses the evolution of recent OR/MS research in DOM in the context of the gaps proposed in Altay and Green (2006). Section 5 presents our remarks and conclusions. The list of the references for all the papers gathered in our survey is available in the online complementary section for this paper.

In this paper we have presented a review in recent OR/MS literature in DOM. Our work is a continuation of a previous review from Altay and Green (2006). We present a classification scheme based on the one used by Altay and Green (2006). Our findings were compared to those reported by Altay and Green (2006) in order to analyze how the field has evolved since their review was published. We found that most trends have remained, e.g., lack of research for recovery activities; but others have experienced shifts, e.g., proportion of ME articles in OR/MS research in DOM. Our review concludes that there has not been drastic changes or developments in the field of OR/MS in DOM since the publication of Altay and Green (2006). Our findings also show that most of the gaps observed by Altay and Green (2006) still remain. This suggests that there is not a clear initiative in OR/MS research to explicitly fill such gaps. We have provided a set of future research directions based on the gaps that still persist since Altay and Green (2006) and the new gaps identified in our survey. We believe it would be professionally beneficial for the OR/MS community to focus on filling these gaps. This will provide a solid basis for OR/MS research in DOM, and more importantly, allow the field of OR/MS to make effective contributions in actual disaster relief efforts. Suggested future research directions include: (i) improvement of the coordination among DOM actors; (ii) introduction of new technologies through more application studies; (iii) study of DOM problems as a whole by exploring well-studied as well as understudied areas that can benefit from OR/MS, using formal statistical analysis to establish realistic assumptions in DOM models that reflect the stochastic nature of DOM; (iv) in-depth exploration of methodologies such as Soft OR and interdisciplinary techniques that are suitable to DOM; and (v) measurement of the effectiveness of adopted strategies through the use of performance indicators. We believe that our results give an accurate perspective of recent OR/MS literature in DOM. Despite this assertion, our list of references cannot be considered an exhaustive bibliography of the field. It is our sincere hope that our findings and recommendations will contribute to the improvement of DOM operations and will inspire other researchers to develop work in order to fill the gaps identified.