Abstract for: A System Dynamics Analysis of Humanitarian Logistics Coordination

After a disaster, humanitarian organizations should mobilize their staff and resources to respond to the needs of victims. This generally happens in a multi-organizational and highly unstable environment where success depends on a joint effort from the whole humanitarian system. Thus, coordination is deemed as a key success factor to logistics in humanitarian operations although it faces impediments to its proper implementation. This paper aims to discuss how donors, media and organizations interact in a humanitarian operation, creating policies focused on a better application of resources that result in undesirable and poorly coordinated systems. Their main outcome thus becomes the gap between the maximum population that can potentially be assisted based on resources limitations and those who in fact receive aid based on organizational inability to extract the maximum of benefits from logistics capacity.