Human Migration Networks, the Refugee Crisis, and Operations Research

The refugee crisis in the Middle East, especially from Syria,  and Europe has been a top news story for many weeks now. The coverage has been extensive and the below graphic is compliments of USA Today.

The migrant crisis has been escalating especially the past several weeks with refugees, thousands from Syria, arriving in Greece, usually now by boat from Turkey, and then following land routes, sometimes with the assistance of various governments, to their ultimate destinations. Some have specific country preferences because they may have friends or relatives in certain locations or they have heard good things about a particular country. Germany, for example, has been identified as a final point for many because of its prosperity and also the welcome that Angela Merkel has been extending.

There have also been news articles that have included interviews with refugees who do not want to go to specific countries.

This crisis with the suffering children and families risking their lives and giving up their countries in order to escape war and strife resonates with everyone and it has become also a humanitarian crisis because of the extraordinary numbers of refugees. The crisis has been called by some Europeans as the biggest one since World War II.

In reading about the crisis and also taking to many European friends and researchers as well as practitioners about it I could not help but go back to some of my earlier work on human migration networks.

Many of my doctoral students come from different countries and, ultimately, they settle somewhere as either academics or industry professionals. My second doctoral student, Jie Pan, whose dissertation I co-supervised with Professor Alexander Eydeland, was from China and he was brilliant. In fact, his English was so good that he ended up teaching math courses at Amherst College. His dissertation was titled: "Variational inequalities in the modeling and computation of spatial economic equilibria: Structural reformulations and the method of multipliers," Department of Mathematics and Statistics, University of Massachusetts Amherst, 1992. We published papers in Operations Research, Operations Research Letters, and the European Journal of Operational Research.

Together we also did a lot of work on human migration networks. My first paper on the topic was published in Economic Letters. Since I was always fascinated by transportation and networks, studying migration was a natural application for me (and I was born in Canada so I am also a migrant, in a sense). In that paper, however, there were no costs associated with migration, which is actually a huge issue especially now in terms of the refugee crisis.  I followed up with several papers in which migration costs were introduced as well as class transformations.

With Jie Pan, we wrote a paper that modeled migration as a chaining phenomenon and also integrated Markov chains and variational inequalities.  In essence, humans can continue to migrate, which we expect to see in the migration crisis in the future. If those who locate in a certain location are not happy, then they will eventually move if the costs associated with migration are not too high relative to the utility gain. Humans compare the utilities of where they are at with the utility of another destination and include also the "transportation" or translocation cost in making their decisions.  Our paper, "Using Markov chains to model human migration in a network equilibrium framework," was published in Mathematical and Computer Modelling and, propitiously, today, I found out that the journal has made the paper available online for free, which is great.

We established in this paper that a stable population distribution is shown to exist under certain assumptions.

Other operations  researchers, who have a passion and inquisitiveness as to how people move in the long-term and where they settle,  have also used our variational inequality framework to build other human migration network models.

Sadly,  Jie Pan died at age 36. He had been diagnosed with lupus and traveled for treatment to China where he passed away. He had achieved promotion and tenure at St. Joseph's University in Philadelphia.  I also co-authored a paper with him (posthumously) while I was a Fellow at Radcliffe on evolution variational inequalities, projected dynamical systems, and human migration. The world lost a brilliant operations researcher, husband, and father.

Amazingly, the work that we did on human migration networks is now being used also in ecology especially in the case of the migration of fish!

Brilliant Lecture by Dr. George Karagiannis on Risk Assessment and Disaster Management

One of the best parts of the intellectual life at a university is the wonderful people -faculty, students, and staff - plus guest speakers that one interacts with.

Today, we had the great pleasure and honor of hosting Dr. George Karagiannis from the Technical University of Crete, who I had met last summer at the Dynamics of Disasters conference that I co-organized in Kalamata, Greece. When he told me that he would be in Boston this week to speak at the Coastal Disasters conference and was eager to also speak at UMass Amherst, I knew that this was an opportunity that we could not miss out on.

Through the assistance of the UMass Transportation Center, the UMass ITE Chapter, as well as the UMass Amherst INFORMS Student Chapter, and the Isenberg School of Management, his visit to our campus and his presentation were a great success. The title of his talk was: "Coordination by Design, or the Common Operational Picture: From Risk Assessment to Disaster Response." George has completed 2 national risk assessments - for Greece and Malta and has worked also with the Greek Red Cross and the training of workers of the German Red Cross. He has immense field experiene and he had the audience captivated.

I was a bit anxious since he was traveling from Boston via Peter Pan bus lines and his arrival was to be shortly after my Transportation and Logistics class was ending. I made it to the Fine Arts bus stop 2 minutes before the bus arrived and together we went to the University Club for a delicious lunch which was hosted by the Transportation group of the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering (a big thank you).  Attending the lunch were: Professor and Associate Dean John Collura, Professor Eric Gonzales, and two former UMass Amherst INFORMS Student Chapter Presidents: Michael Prokle and Shivanii Shukla.

Faculty and students came to Dr. Karagiannis' talk from the Isenberg School of Management, the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, and the Department of Mechanical and Industrial Engineering.

We learned about civil defense and organization of military operations and how they differ from emergency preparedness and disaster relief today. In the former, the organization is always hierarchical whereas in the latter each involved organization can have a hierarchical structure but the key to success is coordination. In many disaster relief operations there can be dozens or even hundreds of organizations involved so information exchange and situational awareness and a common operational picture are essential. Nevertheless, even with the latest in software and ICT if there is not trust among the stakeholders, that is, if the network has not been built on relationships, then there will not be success. Also, the emergency managers must be trained accordingly in the use of technology. In addition, Dr. Karagiannis emphasized the importance of capturing real time data efficiently and then one can make use of operations research tools more effectively. But getting the data quickly is still a major challenge in disasters even with the prevalence of social media (which messages can be trusted?).

Coordination is imperative; otherwise, locations may receive relief materials in duplicate or supplies not needed whereas others have shortages or no relief supplies.

What is needed is Next Generation Emergency Management - in essence, a Dr. Spock from Star Trek.

He also emphasized the migrant crisis facing the European Union for the past several months which has greatly accelerated recently. He spoke of the European Commission as not being a political union and, hence, decision-making can be very protracted despite earlier studies of scenarios foretelling the migrant crisis, decision-making is hampered. There were even decisions made earlier as to where to build shelters.

Tools act as a bridge between people but it is the network connecting people that is essential for the success of emergency operations. And, as Dr. Karagiannis noted in his talk, there is a disaster striking somewhere in the world every week and every 3 weeks one that requires international intervention. Disasters cannot be managed just by throwing resources at them.

Needless to say, Dr. Karagiannis' brilliant lecture, filled with many vivid examples, including a crash in a tunnel (and which county/province would be responsible for relief) brought the issue out dramatically to the audience. This will be a talk that we will be discussing for a long time to come and it has stimulated many exciting research questions.

Eager to Start Work on our NSF EAGER Collaborative Research Project

The good news came just as our 4 year National Science Foundation (NSF) project was coming to a close last month. That project: NeTS: Large: Collaborative Research: Network Innovation through Choice, was a great collaboration with the PI, my colleague, Professor Tilman Wolf of the College of Engineering, who is also an Associate Dean, and fellow Co-PIs: Professors Ken Calvert and Jim Griffioen of the Department of Computer Science of the University of Kentucky, and Professors Rudra Dutta and George Rouskas of the Department of Computer Science at North Carolina State University, and Dr. Ilya Baldine of the Renaissance Computing Institute (RENCI) in Chapel Hill, NC.

This project involved the development of ChoiceNet: An Economy Plane for the Internet and, together and individually as well as with our students, we wrote a series of papers, many of which are on the ChoiceNet site. 

The ChoiceNet project was one of five Future Internet Architecture (FIA) projects selected by NSF.

This project helped to support, in part, 3 of my female doctoral students: Sara Saberi, Shivani Shukla, and Dong "Michelle" Li, who I am very happy received her PhD from UMass Amherst with a concentration in Management Science from the Isenberg School in 2015  and is now an Assistant Professor. She's already completed 2 weeks of teaching and is very happy to be an academic.

Our new NSF grant:  EAGER: Collaborative Research: Enabling Economic Policies in Software-Defined Internet Exchange Points has as the PI (Principal Investigator) Professor Tilman Wolf of our ChoiceNet project, and we will continue to work with our University of Kentucky colleagues, Professors Calvert and Griffioen. 


We have completed all of the followup internal processing paperwork on this grant (thanks to all the administrators for signing off so quickly) and the official start date of our project is October 1, 2015. The EAGER program at NSF is for Early Concepts Grants for Exploratory Research  According to the NSF website: the EAGER program  provides a funding mechanism that can be used to support exploratory work in its early stages on untested, but potentially transformative, research ideas or approaches. This work could be considered especially "high risk-high payoff" in the sense that it, involves radically different approaches, applies new expertise, or engages novel disciplinary or interdisciplinary perspectives.

As we did for our NSF FIA ChoiceNet project, we will be having regular (typically, weekly) teleconferences in which we brainstorm and discuss our ideas with focused, intense period of work for research, computing, and writing.

I very much appreciate the confidence that NSF and our program officer have in us and we will do our best to aim for transformative research results. Specifically, we expect that in terms of the broader impacts that the results from this research have the potential for a transformative impact on how inter-domain routing---which is at the core of economic interactions between network providers in the Internet---is implemented and used to provide novel services in networks. The interdisciplinary nature of this work---crossing the boundaries of engineering and economics---presents particular challenges in developing solutions that are technically sound and can be adopted in practice. The work involves an education component. Results from our work will be disseminated in the form of open-source toolsets and publications.

Nice way in which to begin the new academic year!

First New England Security Day at UMass Amherst

On September 17, 2015, the first New England Security Day (NESD) will take place at UMass Amherst.

It will be a full day event and will take place in the Computer Science building from 8:50AM until 5PM with a free lunch but registration is required. You can come for part of the day since some may be teaching or taking classes.

The website is here.

The keynote speaker will be Jeremy Epstein of the National Science Foundation, who will speak at 9AM.

The confirmed speakers are from major research institutions in the northeast, including Rutgers, Stevens Institute of Technology. SUNY Stony Brook, UConn, Harvard, MIT, WPI, Boston University, Northeastern, and Dartmouth, which is exciting.

This event is being sponsored through  a grant by the UMass President's Office and is part of new energy and initiatives surrounding cybersecurity, with the launch of a Cybersecurity Institute happening soon. The grant was awarded to Professors Brian Levine and Emery Berger of Computer Science.

It has been enjoyable helping out to organize the NESD event over the summer with my Isenberg School colleagues, Professors Mila Sherman, Senay Solak, and Ryan Wright, along with colleagues from Computer Science,  led by Professor Brian Levine,  and the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering (Professor Wayne Burleson) as well as Math/Stats and the Social and Behavioral Sciences - clearly a campus-wide endeavor.

There will also be poster presentations by students and two of my doctoral students, Shivani Shukla and Sara Saberi, will be presenting on our work in this domain.

Coincidentally, last year, almost on the very same day - September 19,  Professors Wayne Burleson, Sherman, Solak, and I co-organized a workshop on risk and cybersecurity at the Sloan School of Management at MIT, which was a big success and which was funded through a grant that we received through the Advanced Cyber Security Center (ACSC) in eastern MA.

It's great to see the momentum continuing to build on this important topic of research with great practical applications.

Below is a collection of the research on cybercrime and cubersecurity of my Supernetwork Center research team, with other work under review.

A Game Theory Model of Cybersecurity Investments with Information Asymmetry, Anna Nagurney and Ladimer S. Nagurney, Netnomics 16(1-2): (2015) pp 127-148.

A Multiproduct Network Economic Model of Cybercrime in Financial Services, Anna Nagurney, Service Science 7(1): (2015) pp 70-81.

A Supply Chain Game Theory Framework for Cybersecurity Investments Under Network Vulnerability, Anna Nagurney, Ladimer S. Nagurney, and Shivani Shukla, in press in Computation, Cryptography, and Network Security (2015), N.J. Daras and M.T. Rassias, Editors, Springer, New York.

The last paper above will be out in about 2 weeks in the book with the nice cover below - looking forward to its publication!

Co-Hosting Disaster Management Expert from Europe @UMassAmherst

September 2015 is National Preparedness Month and, propitiously, the first speaker of the year in our great UMass Amherst INFORMS Speaker series will be an expert on emergency preparedness and disaster management from Europe! His name is Dr. George M. Karagiannis from the University of Crete. I met George last summer at the Dynamics of Disasters conference that  I co-organized with Professors Pardalos and Kotisireas and his talk was fabulous. When he told me hat he would be coming to Boston in September to speak at the coastal disasters conference  I had to figure out a way of bringing him to the UMass Amherst campus. 

Although next week is the first week of classes, in collaboration with the Transportation group in the Civil and Environmental Engineering program, the UMass Amherst INFORMs Student Chapter, and I are co-hosting his visit and talk on September 10. He speaks in Boston on September 11. You can click on the announcement above to obtain a larger image of it.The poster was prepared by the Chapter President, Michael Prokle, with input from Professor Eric Gonzales of Civil and Environmental Engineering. Special thanks to Associate Dean of Engineering Dr. John Collura for also helping out in securing a room, etc., for the presentation.

The poster above has information on Dr. Karagiannis' title and abstract.

His talk will take place in Marston Room 220 at 1PM until 2PM.

Dr. Karagiannis has a PhD and 3 Master's degrees, one of which is an MBA, and for the past several months he has been working in Malta (a country that is on my bucket list) on that country's National Risk Assessment project.

Many thanks for the chapter website manager, Ekin Koker, for putting information on this presentation (although the semester begins on September 8), already on the website. 

Hope to see those who can make it to this great event.

Having Your Operations Research INFORM Policy

One of my favorite quotes on Operations Research is by INFORMS President-Elect Ed Kaplan of Yale University. It appears in  a paper that he wrote that was published in Omega, "Adventures in Policy Modeling! Operations Research in the Community and Beyond,"and says: Modeling need not be “off the shelf”—rather, modeling with OR techniques should be a celebration of creativity.

His paper is a very provocative and stimulating read  and shuts down naysayers.

The paper also is filled with examples as to how Operations Research has informed policy and associated decision-making. The article is focused on community-based policies.  Examples are drawn from urban applications (Dick Larson's research and practical applications), AIDS modeling and needle exchanges (work done by Kaplan), drug control (Jonathan Caulkins), and even homicides and gun availability (Al Blumstein's many contributions), to start, and, of course, security.  Some great work in this area has been done by, I note, among others, Ed Kaplan, Larry Wein, Sheldon Jacobson, and Laura McLay.

Operations Research has been instrumental in informing policies in other settings, as well, from transportation and logistics to the environment and even medical decision-making, and humanitarian operations.

I work on network systems with many associated applications and it is very gratifying when research that you do also informs policy.

A few years ago, in research conducted with Patrick Qiang, who was my doctoral student at the Isenberg School of Management, and with whom I wrote the Fragile Networks book, we introduced a network performance measure, which  allows for the identification and ranking of nodes and links in various network systems operating under decentralized behavior (think of urban transportation networks, certain supply chains, financial networks, and even the Internet). (Patrick is now a tenured Associate Professor at Penn State Great Valley, as of Fall 2015, so more congrats are in order!)

The results of this research appeared in various journals, including Operations Research ones, and even physics, since we wanted to disseminate the work broadly for maximum impact.  A high level overview of our results with some applications appears in: Fragile Networks: Identifying Vulnerabilities and Synergies in an Uncertain Age, Anna Nagurney and Qiang Qiang, International Transactions in Operational Research 19: (2012) pp 123-160.

The Nagurney-Qiang performance measure has been used in Indonesia to assess new shipping routes in a study financed in part, by the World Bank.   A nice overview of the approach is in a presentation on Prezi.

Our performance measure has also been used by researchers in Greece, led by Mitsakis and collaborators,  to conduct  network performance and components’ criticality analyses to assess the effects of the immense 2007 fires in Peloponnesus on vehicular traffic and the overall transport network.  See also recent work by some of the same researchers on climate change and our measure. 

In addition, it has been leveraged in an insightful report, "Guidebook for Enhancing Resilience of European Road Transport in Extreme Weather Events."

Schulz used our network performance measure to assess the importance of roadways in a part of Germany.  

It was also applied in Ireland to assess new Dublin metro lines. 

It has been utilized to assess the potential impact of earthquakes on critical infrastructure and is now even being applied outside the policy arena in physiological settings (yes, networks are everywhere and that is one reason why I love them!).

As for my work on paradoxes, including environmental ones, in 2007, one of my papers was featured in the New Zealand parliament; info here. 

Operations Researchers work on tough problems with solutions having broad and fascinating impacts!

The Joy of Sending Your Book to the Publisher

Last week, I uploaded the finished manuscript of  my latest book, "Competing on Supply Chain Quality: A Network Economics Perspective,"  to my publisher's (Springer's) website. The book is co-authored with Dong "Michelle" Li, my former doctoral student, who is now an Assistant Professor at the College of Business at Arkansas State University.

The book will appear in the Springer Series in Supply Chain Management, whose Founding Editor is Professor Chris Tang of the UCLA Anderson School of Management. He has been very supportive throughout this project and we acknowledge him warmly in the book.

The book is 400 pages and represents about half a decade of our work on developing supply chain network models with quality, as well as prices or quantities,  as strategic variables, of manufacturers, suppliers, or firms that are outsourced to, as well as freight service providers. The book deals with critical issues such as information asymmetry, make or buy decisions, and supplier selection, and also demonstrates how to identify and rank the most important suppliers to a firm's supply chain and to the supply chain network economy. 

Completing the book was a big task since some of the final writing was done while I was in Gothenburg, Sweden as a Visiting Professor this summer and also speaking at many conferences and Michelle was in Amherst,  getting ready for her move to assume her Assistant Professorship position.

The feeling of accomplishment (and relief) in getting the book finished and even ahead of schedule is very rewarding.

I enjoy writing technical books since one can put a stamp on a topic that one is very passionate about and integrate the existing research and literature in a fresh way. Sometimes I am asked what my legacy will be and I hope that it does include my books. Colleagues from different parts of the world have told me that when a new book of mine arrives in their offices, students often disappear with it, which I find to be a great compliment.

Submitting the manuscript and all the chapter files and jpgs to a Springer website was easy and smooth and I was reminded of  how several of my other books in earlier days were shipped off to the publisher. For example, several of my early books, including my first, published in 1993: "Network Economics: A Variational Inequality Approach," which is my most highly cited publication according to Google Scholar,  and which also had a second edition in 1999, were submitted on special paper in camera-ready form and obviously mailed. Kluwer was my first publisher and then the company was bought by Springer.

Several of my books have had disasters associated with the shipment and, so far, luckily, the latest one has had a peaceful arrival and acknowledgment and is now in production, which is thrilling.
My book, "Supernetworks: Decision-Making for the Information Age," published in 2002, which I wrote with June Dong of SUNY Oswego, who was my first female PhD student, was mailed to the publisher, Edward Elgar Publishing in Cheltenham, England, just before 9/11. It ended up during the terror attacks and aftermath at JFK airport before the airspace opened up again.

And, my book, "Networks Against Time: Supply Chain Analytics for Perishable Products," which was published by Springer in 2013, was emailed just before Superstorm Sandy struck on October 29, 2012 to the Springer offices in NYC, which were flooded (they are located on Spring Street). I could not reach my Springer editor for days. This book was written with Min Yu of the University of Portland and Amir H. Masoumi of Manhattan College (both of whom were my former doctoral students), and the other Professor Nagurney, my husband, Ladimer S. Nagurney of the University of Hartford.

There is something special about seeing a book that you have written, hot off the press, holding it in your hands and looking through it (and hoping all the pages are there and nothing is missing).

So, whatever your legacy will be, I do hope that mine, in part, will be the books that I have written and still hope to write.  Even in this era of so many distractions and shortened attention spans, books, I believe, can make a contribution and a difference.