Review of recent developments in OR/MS research in disaster operations management

Potential consequences of disasters involve overwhelming economic losses, large affected populations and serious environmental damages. Given these devastating effects, there is an increasing interest in developing measures in order to diminish the possible impact of disasters, which gave rise to the field of disaster operations management (DOM). In this paper we review recent OR/MS research in DOM. Our work is a continuation of a previous review from Altay and Green (2006). Our purpose is to evaluate how OR/MS research in DOM has evolved in the last years and to what extent the gaps identified by Altay and Green (2006) have been covered. Our findings show no drastic changes or developments in the field of OR/MS in DOM since the publication of Altay and Green (2006). Additionally to our comparative analysis, we present an original evaluation about the most common assumptions in recent OR/MS literature in DOM. Based on our findings we provide future research directions in order to make improvements in the areas where lack of research is detected. (C) 2013 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.