Logistics Optimization in Mobile Aid Provision to En Route Refugees

War, violence and human rights violation across the world have caused migration to be one of the most urgent and difficult global problems. According to UN Migration Office, more than 68 million people are defined as refugees with different status. As an economic and practical solution, governments and civil society organizations prefer to help en route refugees with food, water and health services via mobile vehicles. However, satisfying the needs of moving groups, especially under limited resources, is quite challenging and requires systematic planning. Humanitarian logistics is a well-studied research area with increasing interest in the last 20 years. However, although being critically important, migration problems have taken little place in the literature with no studies, to our knowledge, on mobile aid to refugees. This project focuses on migration problems and mobile aid process with the goal of helping the provision of efficient humanitarian help. In this regard, it aims to fill a conceptual gap in the literature and to expand the field as a pioneer work. As a result of the preliminary studies conducted in this direction, a new network problem related to the fields of graph theory and operations research has been defined. This definition can also be used for different problems where the demand is mobile and enters the network at different time instants and the service frequency is prespecified. The project aims to provide methodological contributions to the literature through the new problem definition and solution methods to be developed.