Table I Comparison of OR methods based... | Emerald Publishing

Table I

Comparison of OR methods based on requirements for humanitarian logistics research (cf. Section 2.1)

	Problem exploration	Type of problem	Ease to reproduce	Contextualization	Data collection	Validation with practice
Operational exercise	Highly realistic	Based on current practice	Low	High	Risky	Very high
Simulation games	Realistic	Flexible integration of behaviour and (new) or standard situations, approaches and technologies	High, if rigorous methodology is implemented (see below)	High	Quasi-experimental	High
Simulation	Abstract	Simulation of new (new) or standard situations, approaches and technologies; assumptions on behaviour	High	Low	Inductive, numeric	Low
Analytical model	Highly simplified	Data-driven; based on past frequent cases in data-rich environments or standard problems	Very high	Very low	Numeric	Low

	Problem exploration	Type of problem	Ease to reproduce	Contextualization	Data collection	Validation with practice
Operational exercise	Highly realistic	Based on current practice	Low	High	Risky	Very high
Simulation games	Realistic	Flexible integration of behaviour and (new) or standard situations, approaches and technologies	High, if rigorous methodology is implemented (see below)	High	Quasi-experimental	High
Simulation	Abstract	Simulation of new (new) or standard situations, approaches and technologies; assumptions on behaviour	High	Low	Inductive, numeric	Low
Analytical model	Highly simplified	Data-driven; based on past frequent cases in data-rich environments or standard problems	Very high	Very low	Numeric	Low