During the ongoing outbreak of coronavirus disease (COVID-19), people use social media to acquire and exchange various types of information at a historic and unprecedented scale. Only the situational information are valuable for the public and authorities to response to the epidemic. Therefore, it is important to identify such situational information and to understand how it is being propagated on social media, so that appropriate information publishing strategies can be informed for the COVID-19 epidemic. This article sought to fill this gap by harnessing Weibo data and natural language processing techniques to classify the COVID-19-related information into seven types of situational information. We found specific features in predicting the reposted amount of each type of information. The results provide data-driven insights into the information need and public attention.

Characterizing the Propagation of Situational Information in Social Media During COVID-19 Epidemic: A Case Study on Weibo

There has been tremendous interest in blockchain technology (BT) (also known as distributed ledger technology) around the globe and across sectors. Following significant success in the financial sector, other sectors, such as humanitarian sector, have started deploying BT at various levels. Although the use of BT in the humanitarian sector is in its infancy, donors and government agencies are increasingly calling for building BT-enabled swift-trust and more collaborative relationships among various humanitarian actors in order to improve the transparency and traceability of disaster relief materials, information exchanges and flow of funds in disaster relief supply chains. Our study, which is informed by organizational information processing theory and relational view, proposes a theoretical model to understand how BT can influence operational supply chain transparency (OSTC) and swift-trust (ST) among actors engaged in disaster relief operations. Our model also shows how BT-enabled ST can further improve collaboration (CO) among actors engaged in disaster relief operations and enhance supply chain resilience. We formulated and tested six research hypotheses, using data gathered from international non-governmental organizations (NGOs) with the help of the Coordinator for Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) database. We received 256 usable responses using a pre-tested survey based instrument designed for key informants. Our results confirm that our six hypotheses were supported. Our study offers significant and valid contributions to the literature on swift-trust, collaboration and supply chain resilience and BT/distributed ledger technology. We have also noted limitations of our study and have offered future research directions.

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Blockchain technology for enhancing swift-trust, collaboration and resilience within a humanitarian supply chain setting

The corona virus (COVID-19/SARS-CoV-2) outbreak has created serious disruptions to many business operations. Among them, many service operations, which require customers to travel and visit a place indoor, become almost infeasible to run in a crowded city like Hong Kong. Motivated by a recent reported real case on an innovative service operation in Hong Kong, we build analytical models to explore how logistics and technologies together can transform the "static service operations" to become the "bring-service-near-your-home" mobile service operations. We also highlight how the government may provide the subsidy to support the above mentioned mobile service operation (MSO) to make it financially viable. We specifically show that the government may adopt the fixed-cost-subsidy (FCS) scheme, operations-cost-subsidy (OCS) scheme or safety-technology-support (STS) scheme to help. We further uncover that the OCS scheme would bring a larger consumer surplus than the FCS scheme and is hence more preferable. In the extended models, we first study the case when service fee cannot be changed because of corona virus outbreak (CVO). We then explore the feasibility of adopting MSO in the long run as a financially self-sustainable service operation and derive the analytical conditions under which MSO is a win-win business model for both the service provider and consumers. Finally, we study the optimal safety technology investment problem.

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Innovative "Bring-Service-Near-Your-Home" Operations under Corona-Virus (COVID-19/SARS-CoV-2) Outbreak: Can Logistics Become the Messiah?

This study examines the effects of supply chain agility (SCAG) and supply chain resilience (SCRES) on performance under the moderating effect of organizational culture. We have used the dynamic cap...

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Agility and resilience as antecedents of supply chain performance under moderating effects of organizational culture within the humanitarian setting: a dynamic capability view

We have reviewed disaster management research papers published in major operations management, management science, operations research, supply chain management and transportation/logistics journals. In reviewing these studies, our objective is to assess and present the macro level "architectural blue print" of disaster management research with the hope that it will attract new researchers and motivate established researchers to contribute to this important field. The secondary objective is to bring this disaster research to the attention of disaster administrators so that disasters are managed more efficiently and more effectively. We have mapped the disaster management research on the following five attributes of a disaster: (1) Disaster Management Function (decision-making process, prevention and mitigation, evacuation, humanitarian logistics, casualty management, and recovery and restoration), (2) Time of Disaster (before, during and after), (3) Type of Disaster (accidents, earthquakes, floods, hurricanes, landslides, terrorism and wildfires etc.), (4) Data Type (Field and Archival data, Real data and Hypothetical data), and (5) Data Analysis Technique (bidding models, decision analysis, expert systems, fuzzy system analysis, game theory, heuristics, mathematical programming, network flow models, queueing theory, simulation and statistical analysis). We have done cross tabulations of data among these five parameters to gain greater insights into disaster research. Recommendations for future research are provided.

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Disaster Management from a POM Perspective: Mapping a New Domain

The work of international humanitarian organizations (IHOs) frequently involves operating in remote locations, decentralized decision-making, and the simultaneous implementation of development and disaster response programs. A large proportion of this work is funded by �earmarked� donations, since donors often exhibit a preference for the programs they are willing to fund. From extensive research involving qualitative descriptions and quantitative data, and applying system dynamics methodology, we model vehicle supply chains (VSCs) in support of humanitarian field operations. Our efforts encompass the often-overlooked decentralized environment by incorporating the three different VSC structures that IHOs operate, as well as examining the entire mix of development and disaster response programs, and the specific (and virtually unexplored) effects of earmarked funding. Our results suggest that earmarked funding causes a real�and negative�operational impact on humanitarian disaster response programs in a decentralized setting.

Vehicle Supply Chains in Humanitarian Operations: Decentralization, Operational Mix, and Earmarked Funding

Multi-criteria optimization for last mile distribution of disaster relief aid: Test cases and applications

Empirically grounded research in humanitarian operations management: The way forward

This article studies 4 × 4 vehicle replacement within the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC), one of the largest humanitarian organizations ICRC policy sets the replacement of vehicles at 5 years or 150,000 km, whichever comes first Using field data collected at the ICRC headquarters and national level we study the ICRC policy Our results suggest that the organization can make considerable savings by adjusting its replacement policy This study contributes to the area of logistics and transportation research in humanitarian operations

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Vehicle Replacement in the International Committee of the Red Cross

We model the global vehicle supply chain of an International Humanitarian Organization (IHO) with a dynamic hub location model across monthly periods. We use actual vehicle data from the International Federation of the Red Cross to feed our model and provide insights into IHO secondary support demand. We find that secondary support demand for items such as vehicles is different from primary beneficiary demand for items such as water and food. When considering disaster response and development program demand simultaneously (disaster cycle management), our results illustrate that keeping a lean centralized hub configuration with an option for temporary hubs in mega disaster locations can reduce overall supply chain costs over a long time horizon. We also show that it is possible to structure a supply chain to take operational advantage of earmarked funding. This research lays the groundwork for using optimization models to analyze disaster cycle management.

Alfonso J. Pedraza-Martinez

Papers

Vehicle Supply Chains in Humanitarian Operations: Decentralization, Operational Mix, and Earmarked Funding

Multi-criteria optimization for last mile distribution of disaster relief aid: Test cases and applications

Empirically grounded research in humanitarian operations management: The way forward

Vehicle Replacement in the International Committee of the Red Cross

Temporary Hubs for the Global Vehicle Supply Chain in Humanitarian Operations