Özyeğin Üniversitesi, Çekmeköy Kampüsü Nişantepe Mahallesi Orman Sokak 34794 Çekmeköy İstanbul
Telefon : +90 (216) 564 90 00
Fax : +90 (216) 564 99 99
info@ozyegin.edu.tr
13.11.2017 - 13.11.2017
Endüstri Mühendisliği Seminerler Serisi / Vahid Akbari
Title: Minimizing Latency in Post-disaster Road Clearance Operations
Abstract: After a natural disaster, roads and bridges can be damaged or blocked by debris, causing inaccessibility between critical locations such as hospitals, disaster response centers, shelters, harbors, airports and disaster-struck areas. We study the post-disaster road clearing problem with the aim of providing a fast and effective method to determine the route of a work troop responsible for clearing the blocked roads. The problem is to find an open route for the work troop starting at the depot that visits all the critical locations, which are represented by nodes in the road network. The objective is to minimize the total latency of critical nodes, where latency of a critical node is defined as the travel time from the depot to the node. We develop an exact mathematical model for this problem. However, for real-life instances with more than seven critical nodes, the exact formulation falls short of solving the problem optimally in a 3-hour time limit. Hence, in order to find a near-optimal solution in short running time, we develop both an efficient heuristic method based on solving a mixed integer programming model on a transformed network and a metaheuristic method based on Greedy Randomized Adaptive Search Procedure (GRASP) for solution construction, followed by Variable Neighborhood Search (VNS) for improvement, repeatedly. We test both the matheuristic and the metaheuristic on Istanbul data and show that optimal or near-optimal solutions are obtained within seconds.
Bio: Dr. Vahid Akbari received his B.S. degree in Industrial Engineering from Sharif University of Technology in 2012. He joined the Industrial Engineering and Operations Management Ph.D. program at Koç University in 2012, and received his Ph.D. degree in 2016. He worked as an instructor in Koç University during the fall semester of 2016-2017. Dr. Akbari joined the Department of Industrial Engineering at Mef University as an assistant professor in February 2017. His current research interests include mathematical programming, heuristic methods and algorithms, network models and optimization with applications in disaster management and logistics.
Venue: AB1 - 511
