Supplier selection in disaster operations management: Review and research gap identification

Abstract

Selecting trustworthy suppliers is one of the most critical issues in disaster operations management (DOM), ensuring efficient procurement of relief supplies and preventing or alleviating human suffering. However, compared with the commercial supply chain, the topic of supplier selection (SS) has not received much attention in DOM. Therefore, the paper aims to review relevant work about SS in DOM and propose future research directions. This paper statistically analyzes articles published between 2010 and 2020 in major OR/OM journals and investigates SS in the disaster context from research problems, objectives, and methodologies. Furthermore, the research gaps of SS are identified, and future directions are proposed. The significant findings on SS topic are that there is a lack of papers that integrate qualitative criteria and evaluation of suppliers into SS; propose models that consider demand-side, supply-side, or transportation process in the uncertain environment; develop more models which consider not only economic-related costs but also human suffering for humanitarian operations; develop tailored SS models for the specific types of disaster; discuss the dynamic SS issue to balance capacity idleness and cost-efficiency; investigate alternative types of contracts to facilitate efficient cooperation between relief agencies and suppliers; link supplier segmentation and supplier development to SS to improve the overall performance of the humanitarian supply chain, and apply new technologies in SS to guarantee the reliable and responsive supply of humanitarian commodities.