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Purpose -The purpose of this paper is to address the inefficiency in resource allocation for disaster relief procurement operations. It presents a holistic and reconfigurable procurement auctions-based framework which includes the announcement construction, bid construction and bid evaluation phases. Design/methodology/approach -The holistic framework is developed in a way that auctioneers and bidders compete amongst each other in multiple rounds of the procurement auction. Humanitarian organization in disaster locations are considered as auctioneers (buyers) and suppliers are considered as bidders. Findings -Unique system parameters (e.g. announcement options, priority of items, bidder strategies, etc.) are introduced to represent the disaster relief environment in a practical way. The framework is verified by simulation and optimization techniques using the system characteristics of the disaster relief environment as an input. Based on the parameters and their values, behavioural changes of auctioneers and suppliers are observed. Originality/value -Combining the three phases of procurement auctions is unique both in the auction literature and in the disaster relief research, and it helps the humanitarian organizations supply the immediate and long-term requirements in the disaster location more efficiently.

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Purpose Using intermodal transportation is vital for the delivery of relief supplies when single mode alternative becomes unusable or infeasible. The objective of this paper is to investigate the use of intermodal freight transportation in humanitarian logistics. Methods This paper first identifies the differences between multimodal and intermodal transportation. Then, we examine the use of each transportation mode for specific disaster types and phases. When combinations of transportation modes (i.e. air, road, rail and sea) for intermodal transportation are considered together with different disaster types (e.g. earthquake, flood and famine), the feasible decision space becomes rather large. To explore this decision space, we have reviewed the academic and practitioner studies as well as several non-governmental organizations (NGO)' disaster archives.Results From this exploration, we developed a transportation mode/disaster-type combination matrix and a transportation mode/disaster-phase combination matrix. We then discuss examples of real life usage of intermodal transportation in humanitarian logistics and share our findings and analyses. Of 369 academic humanitarian logistics articles, only 20 have mentioned transportation mode changes. In practitioner studies, we found a decreasing percentage of the usage of slower modes (e.g. sea and rail) in the disaster response phase over time. We were not able to find a significant relationship between a specific transportation mode and a specific disaster-type or -phase. Road transportation seems to cover most of the disaster operations regardless of the disaster-type or -phase. Conclusions We can conclude that intermodality and the transportation unit concept is not being studied extensively in humanitarian logistics. Most of the relief organizations do not share transported freight amounts in their reports and those that do share transported freight amounts in their reports do not explicitly mention mode changes. We discuss the enablers of and obstacles to the effective use of intermodal transportation in humanitarian logistics and propose future research directions. We anticipate that intermodal transportation in humanitarian logistics will garner greater research attention and increased utilization in coming years.