We will have a guest speaker who is renowned in the field of Operations Research visiting the department of Engineering Management and Systems Engineering on Monday 3/26/2018. He will be giving a talk and would like to invite you to attend and/or forward to students who may be interested.
Title: Column Generation Approaches to the Optimal Deployment Problem
Date: 3/26/2018
Time: 10 AM
Location: Engineering Systems Building, second floor
Abstract:
The Optimal Deployment Problem (ODP) in a humanitarian logistics context arises in preparation for or in response to the occurrence of a natural disaster (earthquake, tsunami, hurricane, floods, etc.) that may cause severe casualties and major infrastructure damages. In this case, rescue teams, medical teams, and various survival and food supplies need to be urgently transported to the disaster location. We assume that the different teams and supplies have been prepositioned at different scattered locations (i.e. source nodes). The transportation of rescue/medical teams and supplies from the source nodes to the disaster location (sink node) can be achieved by using different transportation assets (e.g. helicopters, large military aircraft, trucks, etc.) that have also been already prepositioned at the source nodes. Each transportation asset can carry the required teams and supplies by achieving a sequence of round-trip rotations between its source base and the disaster location. Each rotation can carry a restricted load of teams and/or amount of supplies, and spans a specified time duration. The objective is to transport all the required teams and supplies to that location in the shortest possible time. This problem is also common in military deployment.
Prof. Mohamed Haouari received his PhD in Industrial Engineering from the Ecole Centrale de Paris in 1991. He held visiting positions at numerous universities including University of Arizona, Rutgers University, Federal University of Rio de Janeiro, University of Paris Dauphine, Bolzano University, and Bilkent University. Prof. In 2008, Dr Haouari was awarded the IFORS Prize for Operations Research in Development. He is currently a Professor of Industrial Engineering at Qatar University and during his time at Qatar Universities, he was awarded several research grants from Qatar national Research Fund (QNRF) of Qatar Foundation.