UMass INFORMS Student Chapter Speaker's Series with Dr. Burcu Balçik

Event is from 11am-12pm; Refreshments at 10:30am

Site Selection and Route Planning for Post-Disaster Rapid Needs Assessment Operations, Dr. Burcu Balçik, Associate Professor at Ozyegin University, Istanbul, Turkey

In this talk, we focus on humanitarian rapid needs assessment operations, which are conducted immediately after a disaster to investigate the effects of the disaster on the affected community groups. We address the problem of selecting the sites to be visited by the assessment teams during a fixed assessment period and constructing assessment routes under travel time uncertainty. We represent uncertain travel times by specifying a range of values and propose a robust optimization approach, which ensures that each constructed route is feasible for all realizations of the uncertain parameters that lie in a predetermined uncertainty set. We present tractable formulations that are robust with respect to different uncertainty sets and propose using the robust formulation with a co-axial box uncertainty set for rapid assessment planning. We develop an efficient tabu search heuristic to solve the proposed model. We present computational results to test our solution method and illustrate out approach on a case study, which is based on data from the Van (a southeastern province of Turkey) earthquake in October 2011. This study is joint work with Ihsan Yanikoglu, and was funded by the Scientific and Technological Research Council of Turkey (TUBITAK) Career Award (#213M414).