Gaming as a research method in humanitarian logistics

Gamification in freight transportation: extant corpus and future agenda

Purpose

Several freight operations rely on human cognition and behavior. Tackling these aspects, gamification transforms activities to resemble game-like experiences. Since the freight transportation sector is rapidly adopting gamification, the purpose of this study is to provide an overview that synthesizes the state-of-the-art and plot future directions for research and the practice of gamifying this area.

Design/methodology/approach

A systematic review of the gamification of freight transportation was conducted. After screening 691 studies, 40 relevant studies were analyzed.

Findings

Most studies found positive psychological and behavioral outcomes from gamification. Literature mainly focused on tackling the operational-level issues of road and maritime transportation modes by implementing simulation games.

Research limitations/implications

Besides elaborating how gamification can improve freight transportation, the authors describe directions still uncovered by the current corpus, such as research design and temporality and the variety of modes and tasks.

Practical implications

Practical implications emerged from the studies, primarily focusing on understanding users, tasks and contexts, targeting different audiences and transportation modalities, and balancing motivational affordances, while considering the demands of the freight transportation domain, including dynamic, spatially dispersed environments and cooperation between multiple stakeholders.

Social implications

The transportation of goods dominates much of the global economy and ecology. Therefore, gamifying this domain has a huge societal impact potential, especially related to issues of sharing economy, safety, environmental sustainability and social media.

Originality/value

Beyond providing an original overview of gamified freight transportation, this study maps current research gaps and describes practical recommendations.

Cross-evaluation based super efficiency DEA approach to designing disaster recovery center location-allocation-routing network schemes

Purpose

Finding efficient disaster recovery center location-allocation-routing (DRCLAR) network schemes play a vital role in the disaster recovery logistics network (DRLN) design. The purpose of this paper is to propose and demonstrate how to design efficient DRCLAR network schemes under the risk of facility disruptions as a part of the disaster relief activities.

Design/methodology/approach

A goal programming (GP) model is formulated to consider four performance measures simultaneously for the DRCLAR design. The cross-evaluation based-super efficiency data envelopment analysis (DEA) approach is applied to better evaluate the DRCLAR network schemes generated by solving the GP model so that more efficient network schemes can be identified.

Findings

The proposed approach identifies more efficient DRCLAR network schemes consistently among various network schemes generated by GP. We find that combining these two methods compensates for each method's weaknesses and enhances the discriminating power of the DEA method for effectively identifying and ranking the network schemes.

Originality/value

This study presents how to generate balanced DRCLAR network schemes and how to evaluate various network schemes for identifying efficient ones. The proposed procedure of developing and evaluating them could be extended for designing some disaster recovery/relief supply chain systems with conflicting performance measures.

Quality management in humanitarian operations and disaster relief management: a review and future research directions

Quality management has been widely discussed in the literature, and recent special issues on humanitarian supply chains and relief operations have emphasized the increasing importance of quality management in this key emerging area. In this paper, we provide an extensive literature review in the field of quality management in humanitarian operations and disaster relief management. Our comprehensive review, comprising 61 articles published from 2009 to 2018, leads to the identification of enablers (e.g., transparency, policy framework), challenges (e.g., financial services, identity protection), and theory development approaches, as well as numerous research gaps that must be addressed.