Natural Disasters Management Support Models: A Hybrid Approach Focused on Humanitarian Logistics

Natural disasters worldwide have highlighted the need for special logistical treatment, called humanitarian logistics. It is known, however, that there are significant challenges in implementing systematized logistics processes, especially those related to the infrastructure and location of humanitarian assistance centers and coordination of emergency processes, including the location of temporary shelters. This paper proposes a hybrid approach of a mathematical multicriteria model based on utility theory and FITradeoff for portfolio problems to assist the management of emergency coping strategies for disaster risks caused by urban flooding. Focusing on the principles of humanitarian logistics for prioritizing the spatial location of temporary shelters. By addressing objectives that require a global and comprehensive view, the multicriteria methods are effective in risk management due to their main characteristic of recognizing subjectivity as an intrinsic part of decision problems. Therefore, four criteria were raised to evaluate the order of prioritization for the deployment of temporary emergency shelters. Therefore, complex situations such as flooding, which require contingency planning over large areas and managing logistical activities, are difficult and complex tasks. As a result, therefore, a subset of locations to be considered as community or collective temporary shelters was established, as well as the computational vision and the logistic operations mode needed to operate these shelters and save lives, which constitutes a helpful decision support tool regarding the selection and location of temporary shelters capable of assisting in the construction of the Emergency Plan in response to floods, at the strategic or operational level of logistical decisions.

Keywords: Disaster risk management, Natural disasters, Temporary shelters, MCDA, Utility theory, FITradeoff.

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