Chaos and the Flow Capture Problem: Polluting is Easy, Cleaning is Hard

Cleaning pollution from a heterogeneous flow environment is far from simple. We consider the flow capture problem, which has flows and sinks in a heterogeneous environment, and investigate the problem of positioning pollutant capture units. We show that arrays of capture units carry a high risk of failure without accounting for environmental heterogeneity and chaos in their placement, design, and operation. Our idealized 2-dimensional models reveal salient features of the problem. Maximum capture efficiency depends on the required capture rate: long term efficiency decreases as the number of capture units increases, whereas short term efficiency increases. If efficiency is important, the capture process should begin as early as feasible. Knowledge of transport controlling flow structures offers predictability for unit placement. We demonstrate two heuristic approaches to near-optimally position capture units

Detecting Viruses in Contact Networks with Unreliable Detectors

This paper develops and analyzes optimization models for rapid detection of viruses in large contact networks. In the model, a virus spreads in a stochastic manner over an undirected connected graph, under various assumptions on the spread dynamics. A decision maker must place a limited number of detectors on a subset of the nodes in the graph in order to rapidly detect infection of the nodes by the virus. The objective is to determine the placement of these detectors so as to either maximize the probability of detection within a given time period or minimize the expected time to detection. Previous work in this area assumed that the detectors are perfectly reliable. In this work, it is assumed that the detectors may produce false-negative results. In computational studies, the sample average approximation method is applied to solving the problem using a mixed-integer program and a greedy heuristic. The heuristic is shown to be highly efficient and to produce high-quality solutions. In addition, it is shown that the false-negative effect can sometimes be ignored, without significant loss of solution quality, in the original optimization formulation.Comment: 22 pages, 3 figures, submitted to INFORMS Journal on Computing, code can be found at https://github.com/sudeshkagrawal/VirusDetectionOptimizationMode