Potential use of focused logistics in disaster relief logistic systems. A conceptual analysis

Abstract

The Focused logistics has been developed in order to respond to the asymmetric, uncertain and variable environments characteristics for the actual military scenes. Military scenes have many similarities with the scenes generated in natural disasters events. The aim of the work is to show, from the conceptual perspective, how focused logistics principles can be applied to the logistics operations in natural disasters relief. First an analysis and comparison between military and humanitarian operations was developed. This allowed us to establish which concepts of the focused logistics can be applied to humanitarian logistics problems. Second a comparison between the basic structures of the military logistic system operations and humanitarian logistics systems operations was used to identify potential quantitative models that can be transfer between the systems. Because of the similarity between the operations in military and humanitarian logistics systems, we concluded that focused logistics concepts can be applied in both. So, functional and emerging concepts, besides the principal goals and basic capabilities can be applied successfully. The new knowledge developed in this work is the use of focused logistics concepts as tool to improve response times and efficiency in humanitarian disaster relief.