Dagas: A mobile and web-based disaster relief goods management system

• Main Authors: Chiu, Kenley Lewis Ting, Chua, Jet Orville Que, Lopez, Emil John David, Solis, Josef Lyle Huan
• Format: text
• Language: English
• Published: Animo Repository 2022
• Subjects: Routing (Computer network management); Disaster relief; Androids; Electrical and Computer Engineering
• Online Access: https://animorepository.dlsu.edu.ph/etdb_ece/18; https://animorepository.dlsu.edu.ph/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1021&context=etdb_ece
• Institution: De La Salle University

Being situated in the pacific ring of fire, the Philippines is the third most disaster-prone in the world. Humanitarian relief operations, especially distribution, play a vital role in sustaining affected communities. Past relief operations conducted in the Philippines encountered the following problems: oversupply, undersupply, lack of coordination, and inequitable distribution of goods. Given these, Dagas sought to solve these issues through an Android and React web application along with a web server that contains a database for the different elements and actors in a disaster relief operation (with QR codes) and a first-come, first-serve routing algorithm for recommending a supply distribution route of evacuation centers for donors. Both applications were connected to the server via an API designed using the Django REST Framework deployed in Heroku. The server's performance was measured using load testing benchmarks that measured response time, error rate, query profile, and server uptime, whereas the Android application was profiled using built-in tools in Android Studio. Three variations of the algorithm were developed and compared against one another, namely, a tabu-based algorithm, a genetic algorithm, and a greedy L-nearest neighbor algorithm. These were benchmarked by comparing their route distance and execution against an exact algorithm implementation with the CPLEX library, which showed that the tabu and genetic algorithms gave the most accurate results within a reasonable time range. Finally, the overall usability of the Android and React applications were measured using the software usability scale (SUS), both garnering a grade equivalent to A in SUS standards.