Application of Emerging Digital Technologies in Disaster Relief Operations: A Systematic Review

Logistics planning in disasters involves dispatching relief commodities (such as food, medical commodities, rescue equipment, etc.) to local distribution centers and transfer of wounded people in affected areas to temporary on-site clinics or hospitals. In this context, an important part of relief operations is collecting and sharing and analyzing disaster information about affected areas before, during and after disasters in order to optimal decision making for relief operations. Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) and Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) can be used in order to collect data and Big Data (BD) and Cloud Computing (CC) are applied to analyze data. In this paper, the application of three concepts, including CC, BD and UAVs in disaster management, are reviewed. The aim of this review is to identify the challenges and provide a research gap and future research directions. The correlation between these concepts in collecting and analyzing disaster data and also their potentials in optimizing the relief operations has been the motivation for this research. In this study, for the first time, about 170 papers related to CC, BD and UAVs in emergency and disaster situations are reviewed. Finally, after analyzing the reviewed paper, some future research directions are represented.