RESEARCH METHODS IN HUMANITARIAN LOGISTICS – CURRENT APPROACHES AND FUTURE TRENDS

Abstract

The article sums up contemporary use of operational research, modelling, and simulation (OR/MS) methods and approaches in the field of humanitarian and emergency logistic, based on the records in international research databases World of Science (WoS) and SCOPUS. In both databases were analysed more than 500 articles published in the period of 2014 until 2018. The keywords and content analysis with subsequent literary research was as a main research approach processed by the Python programming language Pandas Library. Main research goal was focused on the identification of the areas and methods used by the scientific community in the examination within humanitarian logistics, published in journals and proceedings indexed in WoS and SCOPUS databases. The stochastic optimization was identified as a most common methods used to solve humanitarian logistics tasks. The research results show that the use of simulation methods in the field of humanitarian logistics are marginal and these methods are not widespread. Further research into the use of dynamic simulations for humanitarian logistics has the potential to enrich scientific knowledge and contribute to the application of scientific methods to the practice of humanitarian logistics.