Humanitarian Logistics – the First Week

Decisions made on material flow during the first week of a natural disaster are critical for victims. Currently, decision makers appears to be making important choices based on experience and intuition with little or no support from quantitative approaches because they do not exist. This research proposes a paradigm and offers two supporting models that will assist decision makers regarding the routing of materials during the first week of a disaster. It explicitly includes information regarding the victims’ needs and the degree to which routes are available in a quantitative way that allows updating as information improves. The paradigm involves the use of information gap theory adapted to the this situation for deciding on the types of supplies to send and the Canadian traveler problem for making decisions on the routes to take