Humanitarian Relief Supply Chain Performance Evaluation: A Literature Review

Nowadays small, medium and severe disasters are threatening our world. One of the important role players in alleviating these traits are humanitarian relief supply chains. The increasing number of disasters in our planet earth urges the humanitarian relief supply chains to focus on the assurance of safety of the victims. In order for this to occur, these supply chains should work effectively and efficiently. This can be possible through considerable evaluation of their supply chain performance. In this paper a literature review on supply chain performance evaluation in general and humanitarian relief supply chain performance in particular is presented. Previously conducted researches from the year 2000 until the present time have been reviewed. The works were categorized according to writers, publication year, publishing journal, technique utilized and objective intended. Then an analysis was made on humanitarian relief supply chain literature with respect to the publishing journals and the research technique applied. The result shows that humanitarian relief supply chain evaluation is almost an untouched area which needs further study. Recent supply chain management techniques can be applied for the improved performance of these supply chains. Based on this result, Supply Chain Operations Reference (SCOR), Fuzzy Logic System, and Artificial Neural Networks are found to be the areas which need further study.