Humanitarian facility location under uncertainty: Critical review and future prospects

Abstract

This paper provides a comprehensive review of the research done on facility location problems under uncertainty in a humanitarian context. The major goal is to summarize and help structuring this topic, which has increasingly attracted the attention of the scientific community. The literature is reviewed from different perspectives namely, in terms of the type of facilities involved, the decisions to make, the criteria to optimize, the paradigm used for capturing uncertainty, and the solution method adopted. The detailed analysis provided in the manuscript also contributes to identifying the distinguishing features of the problems in the topic. An outcome of the state-of-the-art presented is the identification of the current research trends, expectations and holes in the existing knowledge thus highlighting relevant research directions.