Intelligent Decision-Making Models for Disaster Management

Providing emergency relief to the victims of natural disasters is a hugely complex process fraught with many challenging aspects: multiple uncertainties, little reliable information, scarcity of resources, a variety of involved entities, and so on. Nowadays there is a lot of information that could be used to improve decision-making in disaster management, but usually it is not available at the right moment, in the right way, or it is partially known or vague. In this article we analyze the decision-making process for disaster management from the general view of intelligent decision-making to the specific characteristics of this context. This specificity deals with a new kind of logistics, and it is shown how this humanitarian logistics, specifically designed with the aim of alleviating suffering of vulnerable people, is a growing new research area to develop new decision aid models for disaster management, identifying new and relevant differences with other types of logistics. To illustrate these claims, two models are introduced, one for assessment of consequences in the earlier stage after a disaster (focused on the unknown, one of the main characteristics in disaster management), and another one for last mile distribution of humanitarian aid (focused on the multicriteria nature of decision-making on disaster management).