First-aid refugee camp

Abstract

Refugees are people who were forced to leave their homes because of wars, famines, natural disasters and other extreme situations. Most of them have no place to go after leaving their towns and cities, and many need medical attention. In order to help them, UN and many other international associations like JRS, built some so-called refugee camps, that is, places where these people are received and attended. Since the conditions that provoke a massive exodus are intrinsically unpredictable, it is necessary to act quickly when they occur, for preventive actions cannot always be assured. Besides, massive exodus actually includes thousands of hundreds people, therefore refugee camps must be able to take in such a crowd of refugees in a short period of time (weeks or months). A model of one of this massive first-aid refugee camp is to be modelled, taking into account some data provided by the UN about the experience in the Great Lakes (Central Africa) in 1994. Moreover, some experiments will be carried out in order to highlight the relative importance of the different inputs of the system as well as the best outputs which could be used as global indicators for the whole model.