Evaluation of field visit planning heuristics during rapid needs assessment in an uncertain post-disaster environment

A Rapid Needs Assessment process is carried out immediately after the onset of a disaster to investigate the disaster’s impact on affected communities, usually through field visits. Reviewing practical humanitarian guidelines reveals that there is a great need for decision support for field visit planning in order to utilize resources more efficiently at the time of great need. Furthermore, in practice, there is a tendency to use simple methods, rather than advanced solution methodologies and software; this is due to the lack of available computational tools and resources on the ground, lack of experienced technical staff, and also the chaotic nature of the post-disaster environment. We present simple heuristic algorithms inspired by the general procedure explained in practical humanitarian guidelines for site selection and routing decisions of the assessment teams while planning and executing the field visits.