Operations research in epidemic-logistics management: from 2012 to 2025

Epidemic have always been a threat to human survival and economic development. When emergency responding to an unexpected pandemic, managers need to make several decisions under limited resources, and thus highlights the important of application of operations research (OR). In this study, we provide a high-quality literature review on the role of OR in epidemic-logistics management, summarizing the progress in this domain and providing the potential directions for future research. We employ bibliometric tools to visually display the research results, including publication trends, epidemic types, journal distribution, cooperation network among different countries, key words co-occurrence network, authors and collaboration network, and citation analysis of the literature. We categorize the literature from content perspective, including resource allocation, non-pharmaceutical intervention strategies, location path planning, and the integrated model. We also classify the literature from structural perspective, including objective function, research background, research stage, model type, model solution, and research outputs. Furthermore, we identify the potential future research directions in epidemic-logistics management. Our study provides an overview of the research on epidemic-logistics management, aiming to raise further interest in applying OR in such an increasingly vital field.