Humanitarian Logistics

Humanitarian Logistics – Katastrophenbewältigung im Rahmen der humanitären Hilfe

Humanitarian logistics is about delivering goods and/or services to vulnerable people. For instance, this is of importance in the sector of home health care services, as demographic changes and an increase of diseases such as obesity or dementia lead to a rise in the number of care dependent people. Moreover, changes in family structure decrease the care potential within families. Through social and/or medical requirements of people (e.g., application of home health care or patient transport services) and additionally, through the rising number of occurring disaster events as result of climate change, further research in the field of decision support systems concerning logistics is required.

Therefore, the Institute of Production and Logistics deals with:

Scheduling of home health care services

• Development of optimization models for daily and weekly scheduling of mobile nursing staff using individual transport

• Development of optimization algorithms for daily scheduling of nursing staff using different available mobility concepts including time-dependent public transport

• Consideration of different crises and disaster situations

• Development of optimization models for daily scheduling of mobile nursing staff using trip sharing concepts combined with walking

• Identification of relevant sustainability aspects in the field of mobility of mobile nursing staff

• Development of optimization models for the calculation of robust schedules of mobile nursing staff under consideration of uncertainties

• Development of algorithms for dynamic scheduling of mobile nursing staff

Scheduling of patient transport  services and emergency rescue services

• Development of static and dynamic optimization algorithms for integrated scheduling of patient transport services

• Implementation oft he algorithms in real-life operations

Disaster management and logistics

• Development of simulation models as training tools for decision makers to facilitate coordinated disaster relief distribution

• Development of simulation models  to analyse disruptions in transalpine rail feight transport

• Development of System Dynamics models for the analysis of cascade effects of natural disasters and their impact on disaster relief

• Analysis of the deployment of staff to disaster relief operations while supplying a flood-prone area with commodities

Applied methods

• Heuristics

• Metaheuristics

• Matheuristics

• Exact methods

• Simulation based optimization

• System dynamics

• Process analysis