The Criticality of Transportation in Disaster Relief and Humanitarian Operations

The new semester has begun and I am delighted to again be teaching my Humanitarian Logistics and Healthcare class at the Isenberg School of Management. As I mentioned in a previous post, I am also busy co-editing a volume on Dynamics of Disasters with two great colleagues.

A theme that is resonating time and time again with me when it comes to disaster relief and humanitarian operations is that of the criticality of transportation.

The below poster I have on my office door. It was prepared courtesy of the American Mathematical Society (AMS) when I was interviewed by Michael Breen for a Mathematical Moments podcast on my earlier research on humanitarian supply chains. The podcast can be accessed here.

Transportation is essential to disaster relief and humanitarian operations, which also includes recovery in the disaster management life cycle. Transportation is used in the evacuation of people, animals, etc., in anticipation of a disaster. It is fundamental to needs assessment at the disaster sites, once the disaster strikes, to determine the extent of casualties and survivors' demand for necessary relief supplies. It is even an essential component for supply collections from donors or places of procurement. Finally, transportation in often very challenging environments to points of demand can involve multiple different modes of transportation with great time pressures, followed by last mile deliveries. And, when it comes to recovery post a disaster, the removal of debris and detritus due to the sustained damage cannot happen without transportation, as well as the followup rebuilding. the former was a huge issue post the Haiti devastating earthquake of 2010, as vividly captured in a New York Times OpEd by our Georgia Tech operations research colleagues.

Given the importance of transportation in this space there have arisen partnerships between private companies and  humanitarian organizations as well as the well-known Denton Program, for private U.S. citizens and organizations to use space available on U.S. military cargo planes to transport humanitarian goods to countries in need. I am delighted that one of the highlights of my class will include speakers from the Westover Base in Chicopee who will be discussing military logistics and the Denton Program.

My most recent study, Freight Service Provision for Disaster Relief: A Competitive Network Model with Computations, to appear in Dynamics of Disasters, I.S. Kotsireas, A. Nagurney, and P.M. Pardalos, Eds., Springer International Publishing Switzerland, focuses on freight service provision, under competition, for  disaster relief. Therein, I argue the importance of capturing nonlinearities associated with transportation in humanitarian operations to capture congestion as well as competition and even material convergence.

Photos from the AAAS Boston Symposium: Dynamics of Disasters

The 2013 AAAS Annual Meeting in Boston, which took place February 14-18, 2013,  is now over and it was an intellectual feast. The venue at the Hynes Center was perfect, given the frigid temps.

The photos below were taken at the AAAS meeting with the majority at the symposium that I organized: Dynamics of Disasters: Harnessing the Science of Networks to Save Lives, which took place on Sunday, February 17.

All the panelists and discussants showed up -- as the organizer of this symposium, I breathed a sigh of relief, since the weather was unusually windy and cold and there was even some snow accumulation. Although we did have a technological disruption during Professor David McLaughlin's talk, once we located a technician,  the issue was resolved.

The symposium consisted of 3 panelists and 2 discussants with the former delivering 20 minute presentations, and the latter 10 minute ones. The perspective was multidisciplinary with engineering, operations research and management science, computing, applied mathematics, and even economics represented by the panelists and discussants (sometimes under one hat). We heard about radar placement and tornadoes, emergencies and snowstorms, evacuation networks under disruptions, material convergence and congestion post disasters, and the location of disasters world-wide.

The panelists:

David McLaughlin, University of Massachusetts Amherst
Chasing Storms Across Disciplines

Laura McLay, Virginia Commonwealth University
The Emergency Medical and Fire Calls During Severe Weather Events

Panos M. Pardalos, University of Florida
Assessing the Vulnerability of Evacuation Plans via Critical Element Detection

The discussants:
Jose Holguin-Veras, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, who focused on disasters that he had studied from the earthquake in Haiti to the triple disaster in Fukushina  and Tina Wakolbinger, Vienna University of Economics and Business, who provided an excellent overview of the symposium with an emphasis on humanitarian logistics.

We had 1 or 2 questions after each presentation and then opened up the symposium to additional Q&A.

I would like to thank the outstanding panelists: Professor David McLaughlin, who is also the Director of CASA (Center for the Adaptive Sensing of the Atmosphere) at UMass Amherst,  Professor Laura McLay of the Department of Statistical Sciences and Operations Research at Virginia Commonwealth University, who wrote a blogpost on our symposium, Distinguished University Professor Panos M. Pardalos, who is an AAAS Fellow and an INFORMS Fellow,  Professor Jose Holquin-Veras, William H. Hart Professor at RPI, and the Director of the Center for Infrastructure, Transportation, and the Environment, and Professor Tina Wakolbinger, Head of the Research Institute for Supply Chain Management, who traveled from the Vienna University of Economics and Business in Austria,  for their scientific leadership on problems of great societal importance. Thanks also to Professor Ed Aboufadel and AMS for supporting our symposium.

 

 

 

 

 

Dynamics of Disasters Symposium at AAAS in Boston

There is much that by working together we can achieve.

In particular, by bringing disciplines together to harness our skills and expertise, there is some hope that we can help to relieve some of the suffering associated with disasters, whether natural or man-made.

I have organized a symposium for the AAAS 2013 Annual Meeting, which will take place February 14-18, 2013 in Boston, Massachusetts. The symposium, entitled, Dynamics of Disasters: Harnessing the Science of Networks To Save Lives, will take place on Sunday, February 17. at the Hynes Convention Center.

I would like to thank the AAAS and AMS for supporting the proposal that described this symposium. 

I would also like to thank the experts who are luminaries in their fields of engineering, operations research and management science, and optimization and supply chains and logistics, for agreeing to take part in it. Without them. and their terrific work, this symposium would not be possible. 

The discussants are: Dr. Jose Holguin-Veras, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, and Dr. Tina Wakolbinger, Vienna University of Economics and Business in Austria.

The speakers are:

Dr. David McLaughlin, University of Massachusetts Amherst, who will be speaking on
Chasing Storms Across Disciplines,

Dr. Laura McLay, Virginia Commonwealth University, who will speak about
The Emergency Medical and Fire Calls During Severe Weather Events, and 

Dr. Panos M. Pardalos, University of Florida, whose presentation is on Assessing the Vulnerability of Evacuation Plans via Critical Element Detection.

The motivation for organizing such a timely symposium was as follows: The number of disasters is growing as well as the number of people of affected by disasters, with accompanying societal and economic losses as vividly demonstrated by Superstorm Sandy and Hurricanes Katrina and Irene. The understanding of the dynamics of natural or man-made disasters is, hence, a problem of great importance globally.

However, due to the inherent nature of disasters, there are complex challenges: the critical infrastructure, including the transportation, logistical and communication systems, may have been severely negatively impacted and their functionality compromised; there is a short time window in which to respond with the critical needs products, which must be delivered in order to prevent loss of life and human suffering, and there may be great uncertainty due to the disruptions, among other complications.

Moreover, there may be different organizations competing for resources and the complex interactions may result in inadequate financing, inappropriate coordination and response, congestion, inadequate delivery of supplies, including of relief personnel, etc. This symposium focuses on the dynamics of disasters, through the prism of mathematical modeling and the science of networks, to address such issues as prediction, communications, response and recovery, and the resiliency of evacuation networks. This symposium is intended to be accessible to a general scientific audience and will communicate the effectiveness of a multidisciplinary approach for the investigation of critical real-world phenomena. 

We hope that you can join us for the AAAS 2013 Annual Meeting and for our symposium. 

Congratulations to the Inaugural Group of Fellows of the American Mathematical Society (AMS)

The American Mathematical Society (AMS) recently announced its inaugural list of Fellows.

Other societies, that I am a member of, have had the "Fellows" distinction (much)  longer from INFORMS  to The Econometric Society to SIAM to RSAI. I am a Fellow of the RSAI.

Needless to say, since AMS just introduced the Fellows recognition in 2012 the list is quite long with the goals of the Fellows Program being, according to the AMS website;

• To create an enlarged class of mathematicians recognized by their peers as distinguished for their contributions to the profession.
• To honor not only the extraordinary but also the excellent.
• To lift the morale of the profession by providing an honor more accessible than those currently available.
• To make mathematicians more competitive for awards, promotion, and honors when they are being compared with colleagues from other disciplines.
• To support the advancement of more mathematicians in leadership positions in their own institutions and in the broader society.

Looking at the list of AMS Fellows took me down memory lane since not only were there names of mathematicians that I had cited in my papers and books and that I serve on editorial boards with and have also interacted with in various professional settings over the years, but there were 15 AMS Fellows from Brown University, my alma mater. From the Division of Applied Mathematics the AMS Fellows are: Constantine Dafermos, Wendell Fleming, Stuart Geman, John Mallet-Paret, Donald McClure, David Mumford, Chi-Wang Shu, and Walter Strauss and the honorees from the Department of Mathematics are: Thomas Goodwillie, Thomas Banchoff, Stephen Lichtenbaum, Hee Oh, Jill Pipher, Joseph Silverman, and John Wermer.

Since I have 3 degrees in Applied Math from Brown and also a degree in Russian Language and Literature (yes, I love languages of all sorts, including computer programming languages)  I know and even had as instructors many of the faculty on the above list in Applied Math. Plus, Constantine Dafermos was Stella Dafermos' husband and she was my doctoral dissertation advisor at Brown. 

Of course, on the list are individuals who already are Fellows of other societies that I mentioned above.

Congratulations to all the AMS Fellows!

Braess Paradox Revisited, the American Mathematical Society, and INFORMS

I was delighted to read this month's Feature Column of the American Mathematical Society (AMS) written by Professor John Malkevitch of York College of the City University of New York. The teaser to the article: How does a free market approach work when applied to road networks? The article discusses both the Prisoner's Dilemma and the Braess Paradoxis that illustrate that there are situations where, if individuals are left to make their own decisions, the result might be that as a group or as individuals they are worse off.

The article cites the translation of the famous Braess (1968) paradox article from German to English that I did with Braess and my former doctoral student, Tina Wakolbinger (see the bottom photo above), and that was published in 2005 in the journal, Transportation Science.

We hosted Professor Dietrich Braess in April 2006 at the Isenberg School and he spoke on how he came to devise the paradox, now named after him. He delighted us with his presentation (amazingly we were the first in North America to ever invite him to speak on this topic) and he stayed with us for several days.

When I look at the photo above with many of the audience members following his talk it pleases me how many are now professors around the world -- from Dr. Dmytro Matsypura who is now at the University of Sydney (tenured) to Dr. Tina Wakolbinger who will soon be assuming her professorship at the Vienna University of Economics and Business to Dr. Christian Wernz who is a professor at Virginia Tech, to Dr. Shenghan Xu, who is a professor at the University of Idaho, to Dr. Zugang Liu, who is a professor at Penn State Hazleton, and Dr. Patrick Qiang, who is a professor at Penn State Malvern, plus Dr. Trisha Woolley, who is a professor at Texas Wesleyan University and Dr. Deanna Kennedy who is at the University of Washington Bothell.

That year I was a Science Fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University and somehow still managed to help our students of the UMass Amherst INFORMS Student Chapter organize and host an incredible lineup of speakers in the Spring of 2006 and the Fall of 2005.

The visit of Professor Dietrich Braess was one of the highlights and you can find more information about his visit here, with links to the translation and even the preface that I wrote with Professor David E. Boyce.

I thank Professor Malkevitch for writing the Feature Column that brought back so many delightful memories!

As for my most recent research on the Braess paradox (something I was even fascinated by in my doctoral dissertation at Brown University), see my article in Europhysics Letters on the wisdom of crowds.