 An optimization model for volunteer assignments in humanitarian organizationsMauro Falasca and Christopher Zobel Socio-Economic Planning Sciences, 2012, vol. 46, issue 4, 250-260 Abstract: One of the challenges facing humanitarian organizations is that there exist limited decision technologies that are tailored specifically to their needs. While employee workforce management models have been the topic of extensive research over the past decades, very little work has yet concentrated on the problem of managing volunteers for humanitarian organizations. This paper develops a multi-criteria optimization model to assist in the assignment of volunteers to tasks, based upon a series of principles from the field of volunteer management. In particular, it offers a new volunteer management approach for incorporating the decision maker's preferences and knowledge into the volunteer assignment process, thus allowing him or her to closely examine the tradeoffs between potentially conflicting objectives. Test results illustrate the model's ability to capture these tradeoffs and represent the imprecision inherent in the work of humanitarian organizations, and thus demonstrate its ability to support efficient and effective volunteer management. Keywords: Humanitarian logistics; Multi-criteria decision making; Volunteer management; Optimization (search for similar items in EconPapers) Downloads: (external link) Related works: Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:soceps:v:46:y:2012:i:4:p:250-260 DOI: 10.1016/j.seps.2012.07.003 Access Statistics for this article Socio-Economic Planning Sciences is currently edited by Barnett R. Parker More articles in Socio-Economic Planning Sciences from Elsevier |
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