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Relief item distribution to victims is a key activity during disaster response. Currently many humanitarian organizations follow simple guidelines based on experience to assess need and distribute relief supplies. However, the interviews with practitioners suggest a problem in efficiency in relief distribution efforts. The purpose of this paper is to develop a model and solution methodology that can estimate relief center (RC) performance, measured by waiting time for victims and throughput, for any RC design and analyze the impact of key design decisions on these performance measures.

Interviews with practitioners and current practice guidelines are used to understand relief distribution and a queuing network model is used to represent the relief distribution. Finally, the model is applied to data from the 2015 Nepal earthquake.

The findings identify that dissipating congestion created by crowds, varying item assignment decisions to points of distribution, limiting the physical RC capacity to control congestion and using triage queue to balance distribution times, are effective strategies that can improve RC performance.

This research bases the RC designs on Federal Emergency Management Agency guidelines and assumes a certain area and volunteer availability.

This paper contributes to humanitarian logistics by discussing useful insights that can impact how relief agencies set up and operate RCs. It also contributes to the queuing literature by deriving analytic solutions for the steady state probabilities of finite capacity, state dependent queues with blocking.

In the present competitive scenario in the Indian banking industry, service quality has become one of the most important facets of interest to academic researchers. The purpose of this paper is to determine the dimensions of perceived service quality and investigate their impact on customer satisfaction in the Indian banking context, with special reference to selected public sector banks in India.

On the basis of the empirical study, the authors validate a measurement model using structural equation modeling for investigating the impact of perceived service quality dimensions on customer satisfaction. The study sample consists of 480 respondents in the National Capital Region (NCR) of India; the data were collected through a structured questionnaire utilizing a seven-point Likert scale while implementing a purposive sampling technique.

The perceived service quality dimensions identified were tangibility, reliability, assurance, responsiveness, empathy, and image. The empirical findings revealed that “responsiveness” was found to be the most significant predictor of customer satisfaction. On the other hand, “image” (corporate image) has a positive but the least significant relationship with customer satisfaction followed by all other constructs. The exception is “reliability,” which is insignificantly related to customer satisfaction in Indian public sector banks.

The study cannot be generalized in the context of Indian banking sectors, as it only focused on the public sector. The findings of this study suggest that the six dimensions of perceived service quality model are a suitable instrument for evaluating bank service quality for public banks in India. Therefore, bank managers can use this model to assess the bank service quality in the context of Indian public sector banks.

There is dearth of research focusing on corporate image as a dimension of perceived service quality and its effect on customer satisfaction in the Indian banking context. Furthermore, similar studies were rarely found in the Indian context, especially within the public banking sector. Hence, this paper attempts to accomplish the research gap by empirically testing the satisfaction level of a large sample of the population in NCR toward six dimensions of perceived service quality rendered by selected public sector banks in India.

The purpose of this paper is to focus on MHD unsteady flow of Carreau fluid over a variable thickness melting surface in the presence of chemical reaction and non-uniform heat sink/source.

The flow governing partial differential equations are transformed into ordinary ones with the help of similarity transformations. The set of ODEs are solved by a shooting technique together with the R.K.–Fehlberg method. Further, the graphs are depicted to scrutinize the velocity, concentration and temperature fields of the Carreau fluid flow. The numerical values of friction factor, heat and mass transfer rates are tabulated.

The results are presented for both Newtonian and non-Newtonian fluid flow cases. The authors conclude that the nature of three typical fields and the physical quantities are alike in both cases. An increase in melting parameter slows down the velocity field and enhances the temperature and concentration fields. But an opposite outcome is noticed with thermal relaxation parameter. Also the elevating values of thermal relaxation parameter/ wall thickness parameter/Prandtl number inflate the mass and heat transfer rates.

This is a new research article in the field of heat and mass transfer in fluid flows. Cattaneo–Christov heat flux model is used. The surface of the flow is assumed to be melting.