A social vulnerability-based genetic algorithm to locate-allocate transit bus stops for disaster evacuation in New Orleans, Louisiana

In the face of severe disasters, some or all of the endangered residents must be evacuated to a safe place. A portion of people, due to various reasons (e.g., no available vehicle, too old to drive), will need to take public transit buses to be evacuated. However, to optimize the operation efficiency, the location of these transit pick-up stops and the allocation of the available buses to these stops should be considered seriously by the decision-makers. In the case of a large number of alternative bus stops, it is sometimes impractical to use the exhaustive (brute-force) search to solve this kind of optimization problem because the enumeration and comparison of the effectiveness of a huge number of alternative combinations would take too much model running time. A genetic algorithm (GA) is an efficient and robust method to solve the location/allocation problem. This thesis utilizes GA to discover accurately and efficiently the optimal combination of locations of the transit bus stop for a regional evacuation of the New Orleans metropolitan area, Louisiana. When considering people’s demand for transit buses in the face of disaster evacuation, this research assumes that residents of high social vulnerability should be evacuated with high priority and those with low social vulnerability can be put into low priority. Factor analysis, specifically principal components analysis, was used to identify the social vulnerability from multiple variables input over the study area. The social vulnerability was at the census block group level and the overall social vulnerability index was used to weight the travel time between the centroid of each census block to the nearest transit pick-up location. The simulation results revealed that the pick-up locations obtained from this study can greatly improve the efficiency over the ones currently used by the New Orleans government. The new solution led to a 26,397.6 (total weighted travel time for the entire system measured in hours) fitness value, which is much better than the fitness value 62,736.3 rendered from the currently used evacuation solution

Evaluation of e-learning web sites using fuzzy axiomatic design based approach

High quality web site has been generally recognized as a critical enabler to conduct online business. Numerous studies exist in the literature to measure the business performance in relation to web site quality. In this paper, an axiomatic design based approach for fuzzy group decision making is adopted to evaluate the quality of e-learning web sites. Another multi-criteria decision making technique, namely fuzzy TOPSIS, is applied in order to validate the outcome. The methodology proposed in this paper has the advantage of incorporating requirements and enabling reductions in the problem size, as compared to fuzzy TOPSIS. A case study focusing on Turkish e-learning websites is presented, and based on the empirical findings, managerial implications and recommendations for future research are offered

CoPhy: A Scalable, Portable, and Interactive Index Advisor for Large Workloads

Index tuning, i.e., selecting the indexes appropriate for a workload, is a crucial problem in database system tuning. In this paper, we solve index tuning for large problem instances that are common in practice, e.g., thousands of queries in the workload, thousands of candidate indexes and several hard and soft constraints. Our work is the first to reveal that the index tuning problem has a well structured space of solutions, and this space can be explored efficiently with well known techniques from linear optimization. Experimental results demonstrate that our approach outperforms state-of-the-art commercial and research techniques by a significant margin (up to an order of magnitude).Comment: VLDB201

Fairness in maximal covering location problems

Acknowledgments The authors thank the anonymous reviewers and the guest editors of this issue for their detailed comments on this paper, which provided significant insights for improving the previous versions of this manuscript. This research has been partially supported by Spanish Ministerio de Ciencia e Innovación, AEI/FEDER grant number PID2020-114594GB C21, AEI grant number RED2022-134149-T (Thematic Network: Location Science and Related Problems), Junta de Andalucía projects P18- FR-1422/2369 and projects FEDERUS-1256951, B-FQM-322-UGR20, CEI-3-FQM331 and NetmeetData (Fundación BBVA 2019). The first author was also partially supported by the IMAG-Maria de Maeztu grant CEX2020-001105-M /AEI /10.13039/501100011033 and UENextGenerationEU (ayudas de movilidad para la recualificación del profesorado universitario. The second author was also partially supported by the Research Program for Young Talented Researchers of the University of Málaga under Project B1-2022_37, Spanish Ministry of Education and Science grant number PEJ2018-002962-A, and the PhD Program in Mathematics at the Universidad de Granada.This paper provides a mathematical optimization framework to incorporate fairness measures from the facilities’ perspective to discrete and continuous maximal covering location problems. The main ingredients to construct a function measuring fairness in this problem are the use of (1) ordered weighted averaging operators, a popular family of aggregation criteria for solving multiobjective combinatorial optimization problems; and (2) -fairness operators which allow generalizing most of the equity measures. A general mathematical optimization model is derived which captures the notion of fairness in maximal covering location problems. The models are first formulated as mixed integer non-linear optimization problems for both the discrete and the continuous location spaces. Suitable mixed integer second order cone optimization reformulations are derived using geometric properties of the problem. Finally, the paper concludes with the results obtained from an extensive battery of computational experiments on real datasets. The obtained results support the convenience of the proposed approach.Spanish Ministerio de Ciencia e InnovaciónAEI/FEDER grant number PID2020-114594GB C21AEI grant number RED2022-134149-T (Thematic Network: Location Science and Related Problems)Junta de Andalucía projects P18- FR-1422/2369FEDERUS-1256951B-FQM-322-UGR20CEI-3-FQM331NetmeetData (Fundación BBVA 2019)IMAG-Maria de Maeztu grant CEX2020-001105-M /AEI /10.13039/501100011033UE NextGenerationEUResearch Program for Young Talented Researchers of the University of Málaga under Project B1-2022_37Spanish Ministry of Education and Science grant number PEJ2018-002962-

"Rotterdam econometrics": publications of the econometric institute 1956-2005

This paper contains a list of all publications over the period 1956-2005, as reported in the Rotterdam Econometric Institute Reprint series during 1957-2005.