Volunteer Task Recommender in Humanitarian Supply Chain for Effective Disaster Management

An increasing trend has been observed in natural disasters entailing in significant human and infrastructural damage. This highlights the need of improvised Humanitarian Supply Chain (HSC) operations for effective response in disastrous events demanding resourceful preparation. Different challenges are faced in coordinating relief activities due to heterogeneous profiles and versatile experience of volunteers offering services for relief operations. Moreover, prioritization of HSC activities with respect to disaster damages is another concern for organizations. Lastly, while carrying out relief operations in certain calamities, HSC task recommendation to volunteers is also a significant problem. In this paper, an optimized volunteer-task recommender has been proposed based on the Systems Dynamics (SD) approach that improves the productivity of teams participating in relief operations. A number of parameters have been considered by the recommender to assess the expertise of the workforce such as: shortlisting of volunteers based on evaluation of their reputation, experience level, skills, availability of volunteers etc. The results are promising enough with optimized task recommendations to resources in effective disaster management with potential for application in real-time situations.