Photos from Our Great Dynamics of Disasters Banquet in Greece

Conferences are places where you reconnect with friends from around the world, make new ones, exchange ideas, and have memories to treasure of new experiences.

Last night we held the gala banquet for our Dynamics of Disasters conference in Kalamata, Greece.

This conference has been taking place during a historic week for Greece because of the financial debt crisis and the euro.

Conversations on this topic have permeated the conference although its focus was primarily natural disasters. This conference brought together researchers and practitioners from the US, Canada, Denmark, Sweden, Greece, Turkey, Austria, Romania,  Russia,  among other countries.

Below are photos taken last night at our banquet. The beauty of the scenery and the great hospitality and camaraderie we will fondly remember. The important work in this domain continues.

Many thanks to my fellow conference co-organizers, Professor Panos M. Pardalos and Professor Ilias Kotsireas for making this conference possible! Thanks also to all the speakers and participants.

Which Suppliers Really Matter to Your Supply Chain Performance?

We have certainly experienced a long list of supplier failures, whether from natural disasters, quality shortcomings (with the automotive industry being a notable example, as well as compounding pharmacies),  or even due to the Ebola healthcare and humanitarian logistics crisis, with great demand for the timely delivery of critical needs supplies for both healthcare providers and patients being unmet, not to mention the healthcare providers themselves in the form of human supply chains.

With numerous supply chains, from high tech products, to pharmaceuticals, to even food, being increasingly complex in terms of both the network topology, the number of decision-makers,  as well as the distances involved, it is high time for performance metrics and ranking tools to enable the identification of which suppliers as well as the components that they provide matter not only to the full supply chain but also to your individual firm.

First, one has to realize that this is the Era of the Supply Chain Network Economy and tools that just handle one supplier - one manufacturer are completely out-of-date. One has to be able to capture the interrelationships among suppliers, who are profit-maximizing, as well as the firms that they supply, who in turn, compete with other firms.

In our most recent paper: Supply Chain Performance Assessment and Supplier and Component Importance Identification in a General Competitive Multitiered Supply Chain Network Model, Dong Li and Anna Nagurney, that I co-authored with one of my doctoral students, who has done great work on supply chain network competition and quality, we provide a performance assessment metric for the full supply chain, and for that of an individual firm.  The metric quantifies the efficiency of the supply chain or firm, respectively, and also allows for the identification and ranking of the importance of suppliers as well as the components of suppliers with respect to the full supply chain or individual firm. The firms are differentiated by brands and our general multitiered competitive supply chain network equilibrium model with suppliers and firms includes capacities and constraints to capture the production activities. Firms may have a certain amount of capability to produce components in-house, depending on their capacities.

The supply chain network performance measure is inspired by our work on network performance assessment in a variety of network systems ranging from transportation to the Internet (see Nagurney and Qiang (2009) and the references therein) as well as in supply chains (cf. Qiang, Nagurney, and Dong (2009), and Qiang and Nagurney (2012)) but with the addition of the supplier tier, which is the focus in our paper.

Suppliers in supply chains are even vital to cybersecurity and the above graphic taken from our paper was part of the presentation that I gave last month at the Sloan School at MIT as part of the Advanced Cyber Security Workshop that I co-organized with several Isenberg School colleagues and a College of Engineering one.

Walter Isard Memorial Volume, Disaster Relief, and Humanitarian Logistics

Who has influenced you in your research and has had an impact on your academic and professional success?

Through membership in professional societies we get to meet luminaries in our fields and, have you noticed that, many of the "giants" are actually also super nice people. In order to build a field or discipline you need followers and charisma and kindness as well as vision are just some of the attributes that make great leaders.

And two scholarly giants that I had the privilege of meeting and interacting with who, sadly, are now deceased, but lived to over the age of ninety, are Professor George Dantzig, the operations research megastar, and Professor Walter Isard, the founder of regional science.  Coincidentally, they were both, more or less, physically, my height. Of course, my doctoral dissertation advisor, Professor Stella Dafermos, the second female PhD in operations research in the world, who also introduced me to regional science through the literature and conferences, was the third immense influence on me. She passed away at age 49.

And, speaking of operations research and regional science, my most recent conference was the INFORMS Conference in Minneapolis (I posted many photos here) and my next one will be the 60th Annual North American Meetings of the Regional Science Association International conference in Atlanta next month.  For the latter, I have organized a special session in honor of Professor David E. Boyce, another amazing scholar and gentleman,  to mark his 50th consecutive such conference -- incredible  and the conference program with my session can be viewed here.


I will also be presenting a paper in one of the special memorial sessions in honor of Professor Walter Isard. The paper is entitled, "An Integrated Disaster Relief Supply Chain Network Model with Time Targets and Demand Uncertainty,"  Anna Nagurney, Isenberg School of Management, University of Massachusetts; Amir H. Masoumi, Manhattan College; Min Yu, University of Portland, and it is also an invited paper for a special memorial volume in honor of Walter Isard.   Our motivation for this research stems from the fact that the number of natural disasters and their impacts are increasing across the globe, so there is a great  need for effective preparedness against such events. Also, we all remember Superstorm Sandy whose first anniversary we will sadly be marking later this month.

Manhattan without electric power October 30, 2012 as a result of the devastation wrought by Superstorm Sandy.

In our paper, we construct a supply chain network optimization model for a disaster relief organization in charge of obtaining, storing, transporting, and distributing relief goods to certain disaster-prone regions. The system-optimization approach minimizes the total operational costs on the links of the supply chain network subject to the uncertain demand for aid at the demand points being satisfied as closely as possible. A goal programming approach is utilized to enforce the timely delivery of relief items with respect to the pre-specified time targets at the demand points. Aspectrum  of numerical examples illustrates the modeling and computational framework, which integrates the two policies of pre-positioning relief supplies as well as their procurement once the disaster has occurred.

And, would you believe, the Nobel Laureate in Economic Sciences and proponent of economic geography and renowned scholar and OpEd writer, Paul Krugman, wrote a piece in The New York Times, while many of us were at the INFORMS conference, that  I just had a chance to catch up with. The OpEd is entitled: Trends in Interregional and International Trade. Krugman  begins it with: Well, I’ve just paid my first personal price for the shutdown; I’m trying to finish a paper for the Walter Isard memorial volume, and discovered that the International Trade Commission’s invaluable Dataweb is shut down. I know, people are missing essential medical care and more, and I’m complaining about a slight academic inconvenience. But it’s a symptom. 

What a small world and how cool is this?! I assume that Krugman is contibuting to the same Isard memorial volume as I am.

Also, speaking of disaster relief and humanitarian logistics, my former doctoral student, Tina Wakolbinger, who is now a Full Professor at the Vienna University of Economics and Business in Austria, and who took part with me in the AAAS Symposium on Dynamics of Disasters, along with Professors Panos M. Pardalos, Laura McLay, Jose Holguin-Veras, and David McLaughlin last February in Boston shared with me her recent great news: She is the recipient of a 180,000 euro grant from the Austrian Fund for the project: "Optimal Pricing Policies and Contracts of Outsourcing Humanitarian Logistics Activities."

I last saw Tina this past March when I taught a course at her university in Vienna on Humanitarian Logistics and Healthcare.  I think that I made an impact since one of the students in my course is now interested in applying for a PhD in this area and I will be writing him a letter of recommendation.

Crisis Management and Resilient Leaders

People are starting to take notice.

It is hard not to -- with record-breaking temperatures in the United States this summer, severe drought enveloping many states, including some of our major grain and corn states, which will surely drive prices up for food products, extreme weather events and storms happening with increasing frequency, plus climate change even affecting our infrastructure -- from our roads to our electric power networks.

There is even a blood shortage this summer -- the worst in 15 years -- being reported by the Red Cross, partially attributed to the storms and heat this summer.

We have been researching fragile critical infrastructure networks and even wrote the book, Fragile Networks, in which we defined terms such as robustness and quantified synergies associated with network integration, through the prism of supply chains, since, truly, it is supply chains that link our economic activities together through production, transportation, storage, and ultimate distribution. I spoke on Building Resiliency in Washington DC on a special Transportation Research Board panel.

Our world is changing and  leaders must become aware of crisis management.


We are in need of Resilient Leaders.

The Isenberg School of Management at UMass Amherst has on its homepage the following:

Resilient Leadership for an Evolving Business Climate

and it is great to see new courses being taught around this theme and new initiatives.

There is a feature news article, Students Learn Crisis Management in Innovative Isenberg Course,  on the new course in Humanitarian Logistics and Healthcare  that I taught in Spring 2012. In the course, we had speakers from the National Guard, the Red Cross, the UMass emergency preparedness group, and even a disaster communication expert and a former student of mine from the profit sector, who has worked in healthcare. Nice to see my students quoted in the article.

Yes, even the army has realized the importance of location theory in determining where its critical supplies should be stored since it expects a greater role in humanitarian crises and evacuation management -- topics that we studied in my course and timely response and deliveries can save lives in crises.

Our research from blood supply chains to supply chain metrics in the case of disasters can be accessed on the Virtual Center for Supernetworks website.