Metaheuristics in the Humanitarian Supply Chain

Everyday there are more disasters that require Humanitarian Supply Chain (HSC) attention; generally these problems are difficult to solve in reasonable computational time and metaheuristics (MHs) are the indicated solution algorithms. To our knowledge, there has not been a review article on MHs applied to HSC. In this work, 78 articles were extracted from 2016 publications using systematic literature review methodology and were analyzed to answer two research questions: (1) How are the HSC problems that have been solved from Metaheuristics classified? (2) What is the gap found to accomplish future research in Metaheuristics in HSC? After classifying them into deterministic (52.56%) and non-deterministic (47.44%) problems; post-disaster (51.28%), pre-disaster (14.10%) and integrated (34.62%); facility location (41.03%), distribution (71.79%), inventory (11.54%) and mass evacuation (10.26%); single (46.15%) and multiple objective functions (53.85%), single (76.92%) and multiple (23.07%) period; and the type of Metaheuristic: Metaphor (71.79%) with genetic algorithms and particle swarm optimization as the most used; and non-metaphor based (28.20%), in which search algorithms are mostly used; it is concluded that, to consider the uncertainty of the real context, future research should be done in non-deterministic and multi-period problems that integrate pre- and post-disaster stages, that increasingly include problems such as inventory and mass evacuation and in which new multi-objective MHs are tested.

Automated summary

This study conducted a systematic review and analysis of the literature on the application of metaheuristic algorithms to humanitarian supply chain problems, detailed classification of these problems, and identified the need for future research to focus on non-deterministic and multi-period problems, as well as test new multi-objective MHs.