Humanitarian Logistics aims to provide both physical movement of goods and services as well as management of materials during disasters with high efficiency, under deteriorated conditions of the transport and production systems. The scale and scope of disasters impose significant logistics challenges. The structure of the local or regional transportation systems and their network properties provide different opportunities and challenges for humanitarian logistics activities. The role of higher hierarchy transport terminals and connections on the establishment of large-scale logistics activities is clear, as they provide a basis for major materials convergence and distribution opportunities, as well as access to lower hierarchy transport systems. On the other hand, lower hierarchy systems may pose other challenges for distribution of materials and significantly reduce efficiency of humanitarian logistics systems, due to their network properties as well as the status of their connectivity to higher hierarchy systems. The apparent uniqueness of local transport systems, thus introduce challenges in establishing humanitarian logistics chains during and after disasters.
This paper tries to explore whether if different network properties of transport systems pose challenges to humanitarian logistics systems, with respect to different hierarchical levels. The graph theory suggests that transport systems can be identified as a set of links and connections, and thus may also be further divided into a subset of relationships. The literature yet suggests that not only general network properties, but also structure, orientation and shape of network structures may be important. From this perspective, the case of the Thrace Region of Turkey provides an opportunity to study which network properties provide opportunities and problems for humanitarian logistics activities in the possibility of an earthquake, and how a large region’s transport network can be evaluated regarding different hierarchical levels.