Disaster Communications and Humanitarian Logistics

Last week, the students in my Humanitarian Logistics and Healthcare course at the Isenberg School of Management at UMass Amherst had a guest lecture on Disaster Communications.

I had told the students, before I left for Gothenburg, Sweden, that there would be a surprise guest lecturer on March 13, who would be speaking to them on Disaster Communications.

The surprise guest speaker was my husband, Professor Lad Nagurney, who is an expert on computer engineering and communications, among other topics related to hardware. He has also been a ham radio operator for many years.

Throughout the semester, the theme of communications, and the importance of communications in emergency preparedness and response has been resonating.

To-date, the class has heard from such experts as: Mr. Tom O'Regan, emergency preparedness and business continuity manager at UMass Amherst, Mr. Rick Lee of the Red Cross, and Lt. Col. James Sahady of the National Guard.

The presentation on Disaster Communications has now been posted. It discusses trade-offs among different modes of communications and their resilience (or lack thereof) in disasters, along with the Tampere Convention, which the US as well as Russia have yet to ratify.

During the Bellagio Center workshop, Humanitarian Logistics: Networks for Africa, that I organized, under the auspices of the Rockefeller Foundation, the participants had the privilege of hearing Dr. Cosmas Zavazava of the International Telecommunications Union speak on Bridging the Last mile gap through Telecommunications/ICT in Disaster Management. My husband had actually suggested Dr. Zavazava, since he was well-aware of his leadership in this area, and his presentation was outstanding. This workshop, which took place in May 2008 at Lake Como, Italy, was sandwiched between the cyclone that hit Myanmar/Burma and the Sichuan earthquake in China (obviously I had not planned the workshop this way).

Resilient communications assist in a more timely response and enable the flow of critical needs supplies to the victims at points of demand. They are also extremely important in recovery operations and in reestablishing connections among family members and in getting the news out.

Without communications, disaster relief operates in a complete vacuum.

ITU of the United Nations Leads the Communications Rebuilding of Haiti

The Intemational Telecommunications Union (ITU), the oldest organization in the United Nations, is leading the efforts to rebuild the communications infrastructure in Haiti post the devastating earthquake. This effort is being led by Dr. Cosmas Zavazava of the ITU, who was a speaker at the Humanitarian Logistics conference that I organized under the auspices of the Rockefeller Foundation's Bellagio Center program. Above is a photo, taken at the conference at the Bellagio Center in Italy, of me with Dr. Cosmas Zavazava and Professor Panos Pardalos with several conferees who have become dear friends and colleagues and who are from the African continent.

This article discusses how the UN is making plans for Haiti's future with the building of a strong communications infrastructure as it continues to play a pivotal role in supporting humanitarian and relief efforts in Haiti. Dr. Zavazava is quoted as saying: Our aim is to help Haiti mobilize and deploy different kinds of technologies to mitigate the impacts of disasters. Reliable telecommunication systems can be complemented with remote sensing and GIS [geographic information systems] technology. In disaster management, a hybrid of these technologies is important.

In addition, Dr. Zavazava believes that: Haiti needs a lot of assistance. Even before the earthquake, it was one of the least developed countries in the world. It will need a strong infrastructure to run e-business, e-agriculture, e-environment, e-education, and e-health efficiently. E-applications and e-services are a critical ingredient to today’s results-based business model.

I salute the extraordinary efforts of Dr. Zavazava and his colleagues from the ITU!

The Pooling of Resources for Humanitarian Operations

The New York Times has a very interesting, provocative article on the pooling of resources for humanitarian operations and, in particular, as applied to Haiti, but the topic is broader and relevant in other disaster and humanitarian relief contexts. The article is focused on the pooling of financial resources and notes that the Red Cross, although it did not have a large presence in Haiti prior to the earthquake, because of its brand name recognition, has received many more financial donations than has Partners in Health, which has had a large presence in Haiti, even before the earthquake struck on January 12, 2010.

The issue of financial donations to relief organizations and providing stakeholders with proper accounting of donations is an important one and two of my former doctoral students, who are now professors, Dr. Tina Wakolbinger and Dr. Fuminori Toyasaki, are actively researching this topic.

I would argue that cooperation among humanitarian organizations in relief operations is critical and I have written on this topic earlier in this blog. In particular, as was evident in Haiti, there were numerous demand points (and there still are) for such products as water, food, medicines, and tents and the networks of different organizations were not working together in a synergistic manner. Some of the issues were obviously ones of lack of communication and coordination. Nevertheless, when it comes to the pooling of resources, including financial ones, by being able to represent the various activities of the humanitarian organizations as networks, one can actually quantify the synergistic gains from cooperation.

In joint work with Dr. Trisha Woolley and Dr. Patrick Qiang, we have developed a synergy measure that can be used to assess the benefits of cooperation by sharing of network resources. The work is documented in a study entitled, "Multiproduct Supply Chain Horizontal Network Integration: Models, Theory, and Computational Results," which is in press in the journal International Transactions in Operational Research. I presented this work earlier at the humanitarian logistics conference that I had organized, under the auspices of the Rockefeller Foundation, that took place at its Bellagio Center.

2010 International Conference on Social Computing, Behavioral Modeling, and Prediction

Dr. Sun-Ki Chai, the program co-chair of the 2010 International Conference on Social Computing, Behavioral Modeling, and Prediction (SBP 2010), has announced that the conference program is now online. Registration for this conference as well as the tutorials prior and the workshop after is free! The conference takes place at the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Maryland, March 30-31, 2010 and registration is required.

Information on the conference and the agenda are available here.

Dr. Patrick Qiang and I will be giving one of the four invited tutorials prior to the conference, on March 29, 2010, on the theme of our Fragile Networks book.

The growing number of disasters globally has dramatically demonstrated the dependence of our economies and societies on critical infrastructure networks. At the same time, the deterioration of the infrastructure from transportation and logistical networks to electric power networks due to inadequate maintenance and development as well as to climate change, has resulted in large societal and individual user costs. This tutorial will focus on recently introduced mathematically rigorous and computer-based tools for the assessment of network efficiency and robustness, along with vulnerability analysis. The analysis is done through the prism of distinct behavioral principles, coupled with the network topologies, the demand for resources, and the resulting flows and induced costs.

This tutorial will be taught in three modules. More information on all the tutorials can be found here.

Emergency Preparedness and Humanitarian Logistics

Doing Good with Good O.R. (Operations Research) has been a theme of one of my professional societies -- INFORMS. It is a theme that resonates with many and never has there been a time when the best in analytics should be applied to help solve some of the world's most pressing problems.

Crises, in particular, bring new challenges to problem-solving due to the immediacy of needs in terms of food, water, and medical supplies.

This Friday, in our UMass Amherst INFORMS Speaker Series, we will be hosting Professor Jose Holquin-Veras of RPI, who will be speaking on Emergency Logistics Issues Impacting the Response to KATRINA: What Went Wrong? What Could We Do to Avoid a Repeat?
Immediately prior to his presentation, at 10:30AM, the UMass Amherst INFORMS Student Chapter will be hosting in ISOM Room 112 a special reception to display the award plaque that it received at the INFORMS San Diego conference last week.

We are honored that Professor Holquin-Veras will be speaking in our series. Interestingly, last week, President Obama was in New Orleans to survey the lingering impacts of Katrina. Not only do I have a family member living there but also several friends. Some former residents that I know well have left and many are still struggling.

To demonstrate the unique challenges associated with humanitarian logistics and emergency preparedness, I developed a website in conjunction with the Rockefeller Foundation Bellagio Center Conference: Humanitarian Logistics: Networks for Africa conference that I organized. This website contains many of the presentations given at the conference and one, delivered by Professor Emmett Lodree, focuses on Hurricane Katrina and impacts even on his close family. Please also look at the presentation of Mr. Antony Cooper of CSIR in South Africa, which is deeply illuminating.

We are now researching emergency and humanitarian supply chains.