A Great Start to the New Academic Year and Our Research on UAVs!

 It was an exciting first week at UMass Amherst of the new 2022-2023 academic year.

I am delighted to again be teaching my Transportation & Logistics class this Fall. The students with their enthusiasm for a subject that I love keep me energized. And, this week, we discussed innovations in transportation technologies, including UAVs (sometimes referred to as drones).

Coincidentally, although last year, I had the great honor of giving a keynote at the outstanding Optimization and Decision Sciences conference (ODS 2022), which took place in Firenze (Florence), Italy, just before classes began, this year, I could not squeeze in this conference since it overlapped with the first week of classes. Nevertheless, I was delighted that my collaborators, Dr. Gabriella Colajanni and Professor Patrizia Daniele, both of the University of Catania, were able to attend and to present our latest work on UAVs. This year's ODS conference took place in another stunning location - Ischia! And, amazingly, we did the galleys for the paper on which our presentation was based this past Tuesday; the presentation took place on Wednesday, and our paper, "Centralized supply chain network optimization with UAV-based last mile deliveries," was published in the journal Transportation Research C this Thursday. It is open access and can be viewed here. The results therein demonstrate how a hybrid fleet can enhance profits and also reduce air pollution.

Professor Patrizia Daniele kindly sent me the photos below of Dr. Colajanni presenting our paper, a nice lunch get-together, and additional photos.

In the photos above are from l-r: Dr. Daniele Sciacca, Dr. Georgia Fargetta, Dr. Gabriella Colajanni, Professor Patrizia Daniele, and Professor Laura Scrimali. 

The slide deck of our presentation at the ODS conference can be downloaded here.

And just a few weeks ago, our paper on UAVs and 5G with a focus on three phases of disaster management, "A three-stage stochastic optimization model integrating 5G technology and UAVs for disaster management," was published in the Journal of Global Optimization. This paper is also open access and was co-authored with Dr. Gabriella Calajanni, Professor Patrizia Daniele,  Dr. Daniele Sciacca, and Professor Ladimer S. Nagurney. In the Spring semester, I teach a course on Humanitarian Logistics and Healthcare, and we discuss the four phases of disaster management. Great to have such excellent collaborators to engage on such topic research with.

The Book: Dynamics of Disasters: Impact, Risk, Resilience, and Solutions is Published by Springer Nature!

On March 12, 2021, I received an email from Springer Nature, which is the publisher of the book: Dynamics of Disasters: Impact, Risk, Resilience, and Solutions, that I had co-edited with Ilias. S. Kotsireas, Panos M. Pardalos, and Arsenios Tsokas. The email was addressed to Frau Anna Nagurney and stated that the book had been published and was being shipped to my home. I hope that in future correspondence I would be addressed either as Professor or Dr. since my marital status should not be relevant, I would think. 

The next day, quite amazingly, a box with 3 copies of the new book was delivered to our door!

This book is a collection of 16 refereed papers, plus a preface, and is based on the latest Dynamics of Disasters conference that I co-organized with Professors Kotsireas and Pardalos, which took place in Kalamata, Greece in 2019, plus several invited contributions. More information on this international conference can be found here. It was a wonderful conference and the third that I had the pleasure of co-organizing with my outstanding colleagues.

The conference attracted participants and speakers from many different countries, including Canada, Greece, Italy, Germany, Russia, Japan, Nepal, and the US and was a fabulous forum for the exchange of ideas and scientific discussions at a beautiful venue. It is remarkable how our world has changed since due to the COVID-19 pandemic!

The edited volume contains results on many timely topics and the full list of chapter titles and additional information can be found on the publisher's website for the book. Some of the topics in the volume include: drones for disaster assessment, impact of labor disruptions to food supply chains in the COVID-19 pandemic, problems of human migration, infrastructure network resilience, cyber crises, the prevention of geological disasters, the use of blockchain technology, and many others!

The preface describing each of the papers in the volume and the Table of Contents, can be directly accessed here.

UMass Amherst produced this nice news article on our new book.

We are also in the planning stages for the 5th Dynamics of Disasters Conference, which is to take place in Athens, Greece, in mid July in 2021. More information on the conference can be found on the conference website.

The COVID-19 pandemic has clearly added additional complexity to all phases of disaster management and, with disasters increasing in frequency as well as in negative impact, holding such a conference in 2021 is very much needed. Hoping that, with vaccinations and mitigation procedures, it can take place face to face.

Fabulous Talk by Professor Mike Knodler on Transportation Safety and Operations with Cake Before!

Today we had the pleasure of hearing Professor Mike Knodler from the UMass Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering speak in our UMass Amherst INFORMS Speaker Series.

Dr. Knodler in the Director of the UMass Transportation Center, which includes the UMass traffic Safety Research program. We were all very much looking forward to his presentation and it was fascinating and very dynamic!

The morning began with a celebration of the UMass Amherst INFORMS Student Chapter's receipt of the Cum Laude Award from INFORMS at the INFORMS Conference in Phoenix, earlier this month, complete with a cake.

And we took a photo of the officers present.

It was great for the audience to have a chance to mingle with the speaker and one another before the presentation.

 And we enjoyed Dr. Knodler's Transportation Center socks - great branding!

Professor Knodler was introduced by this year's Chapter President, Katerina Deliali.

Professor Knodler began his presentation with the question: "What is OR (Operations Research)?" and stated that their work in transportation is to get OR into practice. He emphasized the incredible diversity of transportation and that the Center has 100 different funded topics in 60 different areas. The UMass Transportation Center links researchers with practitioners and now even includes an Aviation Center with an air traffic control simulator. Several of those affiliated with the Center are also conducting research on drones.

In his presentation he described some of the innovations to enhance traffic safety from signals to infrastructure design and also emphasized that recently the number of traffic deaths have been increasing in the US. He highlighted the many different modes of transportation introduced fairly recently, from electric bikes and scooters to under development, even hovercraft. He also spoke about complete streets and complete networks.

A highlight was when he brought out a Segway (and then another one was delivered) and brave members in the audience had the opportunity to ride one.

What very much impressed me was how the research done at the Transportation Center has become policy not only in the state of Massachusetts but even nationally.

After the great presentation and exciting Q&A we took a group photo.

Then it was time for lunch at the University Club and continuing conversations. Professor Knodler, though, had a meeting, and had to miss the desserts.

We thank Professor Knodler for taking the time out of his very busy schedule to share with us the exciting contributions of his research group and the UMass Amherst Transportation Center!

For more photos, do check out the UMass Amherst INFORMS Student Chapter writeup by Haris Csipetas.