Process-oriented disaster response management: a structured literature review

Purpose – The application of business process methods in the domain of disaster response management (DRM) is seen as promising approach due to the similarity of business processes and disaster response processes at the general structure and goals. But up to now only a few approaches were able to handle the special characteristics of the DRM domain. Thus, the purpose of this paper is to identify the existing approaches and analyze them for the discussion of general requirements for applying methods and tools from business process management to DRM. Design/methodology/approach – A structured literature review covering a wide field of information system-related publications (conferences and journals) is used to identify and classify general requirements discussed as the state of the art. Findings – The work in this paper resulted in a suitable classification of requirements for the development of process-oriented DRM approaches deduced from the existing work. This was used to outline and analyze the current research landscape of this topic and identify research gaps as well as existing limitations. Research limitations/implications – Although the review of the state of the art is based on a wide set of publication databases, there may exist relevant research papers which have not been taken into consideration. Originality/value – The elaborated requirements provide value for both the research community and practitioners. They can be considered to develop new or improve existing DRM systems and, thus, to exploit the potentials of process-oriented IT in supporting DRM in the case of disaster.