Humanitarian Smart Supply Chain: Classification and New Trends for Future Research

During the crisis, relief supply chain management (also known as humanitarian supply chain management) has received great attention these days. The core questions facing many humanitarian organizations are: where are their strengths/weaknesses? Are they positioned to be effective in their supply chain system? What challenges do you need to overcome? What do they need to do to take advantage of the technological opportunities offered nowadays? These questions have been addressed them extensively during the past two decades. This paper tries to review and classify some of the papers carried out in key areas of the humanitarian supply chain such as location, certainty and uncertainty, relief teams and injured (patient) classification, machine learning, queue theory, the employed research methods, solution methods, and the type of objective functions. The paper begins first to define what the “humanitarian” ecosystem may include, and which actors play important roles. After, certain critical views of the humanitarian relief supply chain are examined. The critical views of the humanitarian relief supply chain would help researchers to introduce further research orientations and areas to overcome crises in the real world.