refugees queueing

Project: The refugee crisis in Europe: Modelling Humanitarian Logistics

This project is due to the refugee crisis in 2016, which challenged the European countries' capabilities to receive and take care of refugees. The goal is an expert information system that provides suggestions for how to optimize the use of available resources for refugee hosting in a good manner.

Project information

Project manager
L M M Royakkers, Eindhoven University of Technology, the Netherlands
Project members at Linnaeus University
Darek Haftor, Department of Informatics
Participating organizations
ARP, NOVA Instituut, Prisma, Eindhoven University of Technology, all in the Netherlands; Gunilla Bradley Centre for Digital Business, Linnaeus University; North-West University, South Africa
Financier
NWO, the Netherlands
Timetable
2017-2019
Subject
Informatics (Department of Informatics, Faculty of Technology)

More about the project

The Refugee Crisis in Europe: Modelling Humanitarian Logistics project is founded mainly by the Dutch national research organization NWO. The project focuses on the logistical difficulties that emerge when high volumes of refugees come into a country.

Last year's refugee crisis challenged the existing capacity to receive and host refugees coming from the Middle East. Such peak situations manifest different demands on transportation, available resources and accommodations; the demands are not evenly distributed over time and space. This means that needed resources are not available at the right time and that people suffer.

These situations are difficult to predict and there is little time for planning. The key question here is how to utilize available resources in a manner that offers greater flexibility and availability and thereby contributes to a resolution of demand peaks in humanitarian help, yet without adding massive additional resources.

A planned outcome of the project is a prototype of an expert information system that provides suggestions for how to optimize the use of available resources for refugee hosting in a manner that accounts for the ethical positions of the involved stakeholders of a given situation.

The project is managed by Dr L M M Royakkers from the Eindhoven University of Technology. The project team includes a set of experts involved on part-time bases, together with two full-time postdoctoral researchers. One of them focuses on the technical solutions and one on the ethical implications of challenging situations and the offered solutions. The project started in April 2017 and is scheduled for two years.

Experts from the Gunilla Bradley Centre for Digital Business at Linnaeus University are to provide with knowledge about how digital technologies may be used in the most cost efficient manner in a given situation.

Image: CC-BY-SA-4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:A_line_of_Syrian_refugees_crossing_the_border_of_Hungary_and_Austria_on_their_way_to_Germany._Hungary,_Central_Europe,_6_September_2015.jpg