Humanitarian demining is still a highly laborintensive and high-risk operation. Advanced sensors and mechanical aids can significantly reduce the demining time. In this context, it is the aim to develop a humanitarian demining mobile robot which is able to scan semi-automatically a minefield. This paper discusses the development of a control scheme for such a semi-autonomous mobile robot for hu...

Differential evolution (DE) is a population-based stochastic search algorithm which has shown a good performance in solving many benchmarks and real-world optimization problems. Individuals in the standard DE, and most of its modifications, exhibit the same search characteristics because of the use of the same DE scheme. This paper proposes a simple and effective heterogeneous DE (HDE) to balan...

This article looks at the tension between principles and politics in the response to the Afghan crisis, and more specifically at the extent to which humanitarian agencies have been able to protect themselves and their activities from overt instrumentalization by those pursuing partisan political agendas. After a short historical introduction, it focuses on the tensions around the issue of ‘cohe...

Humanitarian supply chain management has attracted research attention in the recent years. In this paper, an attempt is made to review the status of leading published literature in humanitarian logistics and supply chain management. A literature classification scheme is suggested. The reviewed journals are classified according to research publication, publication year, topics and research metho...

During the management of the crisis after the earthquake occurred in Haiti in 12 January 2010, Brazil played an important role on the efforts of humanitarian assistance. Based on bibliography and documents the paper presents the role played by Brazil with the focus on the humanitarian assistance as part of country’ foreign policy as an emerging power to increase the presence into the internatio...

The complexity associated to Humanitarian Demining becomes very high due to its broad set of activities, which beyond the already complex of landmine removal, includes other socio-economic supporting activities. Hence, more complex computer based supporting systems are required. The main goal of this article is to describe potential applications of multi-agent systems to the Humanitarian Demini...

BACKGROUND Societal instability and crises can cause rapid, large-scale movements. These movements are poorly understood and difficult to measure but strongly impact health. Data on these movements are important for planning response efforts. We retrospectively analyzed movement patterns surrounding a 2010 humanitarian crisis caused by internal political conflict in Côte d'Ivoire using two diff...