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

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.