Development of a Dashboard for a Local Food Bank

Yogeeta Desai,Steven Jiang,Lauren Davis

doi:10.3844/ajeassp.2017.218.228

Abstract

Hunger relief is one of the major needs during humanitarian emergencies. It presents significant challenges to aid organizations trying to manage data, information and knowledge about the situation or event. Food banks receive donations from a variety of sources to meet their demand. The distribution of donated food to meet the unmet hunger needs is a critical issue faced by the food banks across the nation. This paper presents a methodology to apply interactive dashboards to a food bank's decision making process. The first step of this research focuses on understanding the existing decision making process of a food bank. Data from a local food bank was used for this research. Data mining tools were employed to develop predictive models for food bank decision making. Appropriate visualization techniques were identified that can be used to visualize the data mining results. An interactive dashboard was developed and evaluated to enable effective decision making. The results indicated that interactive dashboards were highly effective as compared to the traditional data retrieval system for decision making in food bank operations. The new methodology can be extended to other food banks and hunger-relief organizations which deal with big data.

Highlights

An estimated 14% of households in the United States were food insecure at least once during the year 2014 (Coleman-Jensen et al, 2015)
This paper focuses the on the development of the interactive dashboard to visualize the results of the data analytics
An initial version of the dashboard was developed based on the process evaluation and requirements analysis

Summary

Introduction

An estimated 14% of households in the United States were food insecure at least once during the year 2014 (Coleman-Jensen et al, 2015). 5.6% of households had very low food security which meant that their eating patterns were disrupted because of the lack of money and other resources for food (Gundersen et al, 2011). Reducing food losses by just 15% would be enough to feed more than 25 million Americans every year when one in six Americans lack a secure supply of food to their tables (Coleman-Jensen et al, 2011). Increasing the efficiency of the food system is a triple bottom-line solution that requires collaborative efforts by businesses, governments and consumers (Coleman-Jensen et al, 2011)

Methods

Results

Discussion

Conclusion