Leveraging digital twin to enhance humanitarian logistics operations

Effectively managing emergency material reserve-distribution and disaster waste collection-transfer activities is crucial in improving the performance of humanitarian logistics operations during major sudden public health incidents. This paper significantly contributes by proposing a framework, mechanism, and mode for the digital twin-enabled synchronization optimization of these activities. Leveraging semantic bill of X theory that structures elements and their interrelationships as various bills and allows exploration of system operations through interactive rules to achieve resource integration and on-demand services, a digital twin framework is introduced to synchronize emergency material reserve-distribution and disaster waste collection-transfer. This framework incorporates inter-governmental relationships and employs a digital twin visualization platform for synchronization optimization mechanisms. This paper further proposes multi-level, continuous, and smart synchronization management and control modes from the perspectives of multi-layer, multi-temporal, and multi-domain. Results indicate that the digital twin framework effectively elucidates the intrinsic mechanism for formulating the corresponding mathematical programming models. The inter-governmental relationship approach improves horizontal and vertical connectivity among emergency organizations. The constructed synchronization management and control modes offer new insights into the top-level design for managing emergency material reserve-distribution and disaster waste collection-transfer during major sudden public health incidents.