Operations research for delivering humanitarian aid

Disasters are unexpected events characterized by uncertainty in their impact. These events may generate disruptions on the road network, such as collapsed bridges, or roads covered by water or debris. The affected roads cannot be used to travel on. Disruptions reduce the number of roads to reach victims, i.e., to people affected by the disaster. Their impacts are more severe in networks with a limited number of roads, e.g., rural zones. Thus, we define a disrupted road network as a subnetwork of the known road network that contains the roads that still work. Most works addressing the problem of unknown information in a disrupted road network assume that a set of probable scenarios can model disruptions and uncertainty. Despite the growing number of studies in humanitarian logistics, there is a limited number of research addressing response operations after a disaster and the use of drones. Organizations in disaster management, such as the Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team and WeRobotics have been starting to include new technologies. The use of drones in humanitarian logistics led to a decrease in the operational times needed for immediate explorations. In current practice, a drone tries to cover the whole affected zone using a zigzag trajectory, However, a drone usually can only cover a limited number of geographical points of the affected zone within a reasonable time, Routing operations to plan the flight of a drone are inefficient and they do not meet the needs of humanitarian logistics. As a result, several commercial and industrial projects are looking to develop tools to improve the reliability of routing decisions, to reduce expenses and flight times of the fleet of drones. In particular, in cases in where flight routes have to be defined on the fly.