Title of Document: A MATHEMATICAL FRAMEWORK FOR OPTIMIZING DISASTER RELIEF LOGISTICS Abbas Mohasel Afshar, 2011 Directed By: Professor Ali Haghani Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering In today’s society that disasters seem to be striking all corners of the globe, the importance of emergency management is undeniable. Much human loss and unnecessary destruction of infrastructure can ...

During the last decade, funds to face humanitarian operations have increased approximately ten times. According to the Global Humanitarian Assistance Report, in 2013 the humanitarian funding requirement was by US$ 22 billion, which represents 27.2% more than the requested in 2012. Furthermore, the transportation cost represents between one third to twothirds from the total logistics cost. There...

In this paper, we present a new Generalized Nash Equilibrium (GNE) model for post-disaster humanitarian relief by introducing novel financial funding functions and altruism functions, and by also capturing competition on the logistics side among humanitarian organizations. The common, that is, the shared, constraints associated with the relief item deliveries at points of need are imposed by an...

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to highlight the importance of property rights institutions to disaster relief efforts, with a focus on the US Federal Emergency Management Agency in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans, Louisiana. Design/methodology/approach – The paper utilizes public choice, Austrian, and new institutional analyses of bureaucracy. It discusses private and ...

Research suggests that a donor country’s decision to provide post-disaster assistance is not only driven by the severity of a disaster and the resulting humanitarian needs in the recipient country but also by strategic considerations. We argue that the identification of the determinants of the size of disaster assistance is a first step in the analysis of the donor’s behavior. Since all aid is ...

1. A model can simplify complex events by helping to distinguish between critical elements. Its usefulness is more significant when responding to disasters with severe time constraints. 2. Comparing actual conditions with a theoretical model can lead to a better understanding of the current situation and can thus facilitate the planning process and the comprehensive completion of disaster manag...

To perform complex tasks, a team of robots requires both reactive and deliberative planning. For reactive control, a restricted variant of Linear Temporal Logic called General Reactivity(1) can be used to synthesize correct-byconstruction controllers in polynomial time, but they often ignore time and resource constraints to maintain tractable synthesis. For deliberation, hierarchical planning c...

Multicasting is an important communication paradigm for enabling the dissemination of information selectively. This paper considers the problem of optimal secure multicasting in a communication network captured through a graph ( optimal is in an interesting sense) and provides a doubly optimal solution using results from source coding. It is realized that the solution leads to optimal design ( ...

People prefer their own initials to other letters, influencing preferences in many domains. The “name letter effect” (Nuttin, 1987) may not apply to negatively valenced targets if people are motivated to downplay or distance themselves from negative targets associated with the self, as previous research has shown (e.g., Finch & Cialdini, 1989). In the current research we examine the relationshi...