Evaluation of the System of Disaster Management Resulting from War Operations and Terrorism in Iraq

Nowadays the science of disaster and crisis management is considered as one of the important sciences all over the world. Therefore, disaster management is considered an important and common subject that requires great efforts. So continuous research is one of the important ways to establish the best methods to evaluate and develop the management of disasters and crises. Such methods are appropriate to deal with the suffering that many countries experience from natural and environmental disasters from time to time. This research aims to show the significance of disaster and crisis management in general. It also explores the current situation related to disaster response management in Iraq. This exploration focuses on the achievement of the basic functions of the management operation (planning, organizing, directing, controlling). In addition, it identifies the weaknesses and the strengths of the current administrative system in all its elements and analyses all the problems and the defects in every element, in order to treat and solve these problems and defects by making recommendations to improve the immediate response system to serve Iraqi disaster management in the future. In order to satisfy this aim, data collection included information obtained from literatures relating to disaster and crisis management. In addition, other information was obtained from a field survey of the directories of the civil defence in Iraq. Furthermore, collective and personal interviews with specialists related to disasters and crisis resulting from the war operations and terrorism were conducted. Analysis of the data results revealed many weak points in the current system and this was confirmed by the field survey. It showed us more clearly the areas where the weak points appear in the management function, especially in the planning and organization functions. One of the most important weak points is the absence of heavy equipment, as well as the shortage of specialist engineering staff and a dependence on assistance from other service departments. This is because of the local roles and the departmental management in the government. Finally, the study reached a set of conclusions and recommendations, including providing the directories of the civil defence with the heavy rescue equipment and providing specialist trained engineering staff to deal with the disasters and crises. Moreover, it sets in place an incentive scheme for the related members of the directories of the civil defence. Such schemes encourage them to continue working to face the unnatural circumstances that Iraq is experiencing and to create an environment similar to that of developed countries in the world. This contributes to overcoming the disasters of all shapes and reduces the damage to lives and property

On Robust Tie-line Scheduling in Multi-Area Power Systems

The tie-line scheduling problem in a multi-area power system seeks to optimize tie-line power flows across areas that are independently operated by different system operators (SOs). In this paper, we leverage the theory of multi-parametric linear programming to propose algorithms for optimal tie-line scheduling within a deterministic and a robust optimization framework. Through a coordinator, the proposed algorithms are proved to converge to the optimal schedule within a finite number of iterations. A key feature of the proposed algorithms, besides their finite step convergence, is the privacy of the information exchanges; the SO in an area does not need to reveal its dispatch cost structure, network constraints, or the nature of the uncertainty set to the coordinator. The performance of the algorithms is evaluated using several power system examples

A distributed accelerated gradient algorithm for distributed model predictive control of a hydro power valley

A distributed model predictive control (DMPC) approach based on distributed optimization is applied to the power reference tracking problem of a hydro power valley (HPV) system. The applied optimization algorithm is based on accelerated gradient methods and achieves a convergence rate of O(1/k^2), where k is the iteration number. Major challenges in the control of the HPV include a nonlinear and large-scale model, nonsmoothness in the power-production functions, and a globally coupled cost function that prevents distributed schemes to be applied directly. We propose a linearization and approximation approach that accommodates the proposed the DMPC framework and provides very similar performance compared to a centralized solution in simulations. The provided numerical studies also suggest that for the sparsely interconnected system at hand, the distributed algorithm we propose is faster than a centralized state-of-the-art solver such as CPLEX