# Dynamic Relief Items Distribution Model with Sliding Time Window in the Post-Disaster Environment
## 7 Discussion and Future Research Directions  
Under a disaster environment, in any smart city, the information related to disaster impact, connecting routes and other available resources change dynamically, which has an impact on generating an optimal distribution schedule. With the emergence of the use of IoT technologies for data gathering in smart cities, the influential parameters for a RID model in a disaster environment can be updated accurately and timely. The generation of effective relief item distribution schedules with the updating information is crucial in effective relief management operations. Robustness of relief item distribution schedules concerning uncertainty of demand, transportation link complexity and changing priorities is as equally important as other factors for relief item distribution management in a disaster environment. This uncertainty adds additional challenges to the RID management. Additionally, with the increase in the complexity of finding the best feasible transportation link for vehicle routing, the complications of effective distribution planning have increased. With the consideration of transportation link conditions and capacity in distribution planning, the presented RID model enhances the effectiveness of humanitarian supply chain management. In addition, the RID model often lacks consideration of the priority aspects. The inclusion of multiple priorities in the presented dynamic RID model distribution schedule provides a rational distribution of relief items across all the disaster points. This rationalised distribution balances the distribution task, reflecting the effecitveness of RID management. Along with rational distribution, multi-objective and heterogeneous fleet vehicle transportation often appeared to be other challenges. These two additional aspects, multi-objective and heterogeneous fleet vehicle, have also been included to cover the more realistic scenariosof relief item distribution after any disaster. Modelling RID with heterogeneous vehicles allows to optimise the distribution time and operaional cost as the model chooses the best-fit vehicles for the relief item distribution. Often, a disaster requires a longer period of support to bring the disaster victim's life back normal conditions. Considering this, in the presented dynamic model, multiple time slots with the updated information on disaster impact level, updated vehicle information, available resources and road condition are considered for the distribution of relief item re-optimisation of the distribution schedule at each time slot gives the mulit-period distribution as an optimised solution for a longer run as well. With the inclusion of these major components, the presented dynamic RID model appeared as an effective model in post-disaster humanitarian supply chain management. The comparative study showed that the different models have their advantages and disadvantages. However, the presented dynamic RID model with fuzzified distance and multi-priorities with a sliding window reflected the best feasible condition that covered many of the components that have an impact on the generation of the distribution schedule. The presented dynamic models have advantages over the model used for the case study scenarios model [14] as it brings the dynamicity on disaster condition updates and available resoources to each time-period. Concerning managerial aspects, covering many disaster impact components in one model makes the disaster relief operation task more effective than the traditional models. The major advantage of the presented dynamic RID model is that it starts with an initial optimised distribution schedule and re-optimised on each time slot with the updated information for all the components. In future research, the proposed dynamic distribution model can be incorporated with real-time data collection mechanisms such as GIS mapping, satellite imaging, social media data mining and IoT sensor implementation.