Managing Volunteers in Disaster Situations - An Overview of Models for Decision-Makers

Abstract

Volunteers are a valuable resource in disaster management. Yet to be useful, decision-makers need to manage this
resource properly. However, managing volunteers differs from managing traditional work forces in multiple aspects:
volunteers can spontaneously decide to offer their help, may have different skills and preferences for different tasks
and can leave the system at any time. Several models for optimising volunteer management in disaster scenarios
have been presented in the past. To provide an overview of existing approaches, this article provides a structured
literature review, discusses the challenges of integrating these models into decision support systems and identifies
future research directions. In total, 31 articles were identified, of which more than half were published in the last
five years. Most authors addressed the issue of assigning volunteers to tasks, while little attention was paid to
predicting the number of volunteers and optimising the composition of volunteer teams.