Developing Early Risk Detection and Preparedness System with Risk Analysis and Contingency Plan

PresentationWhen the natural or human-made disasters, such as hurricanes, floods, tornadoes, wildfires and gas leaks, threaten a populated area, mass casualties and property losses may be followed. To avoid, minimize or eliminate the risks for public safety, a well-organized early risk detection and preparedness system is needed in order to save lives and minimize losses. To make this early detection system efficient yet effective, a mobile app, risk preparedness aid, was developed. This aid system can communicate with sensors, location information, and disaster management server. The aid was designed using the concepts of location based service and risk management and it includes gas leak detection, warning and emergency evacuation procedure with routing. Based on the identified risks and preparing procedure, various contingency plans were developed. The contingency plans should be very clear so that it is easy for public and employee to follow. Because each system has unique infrastructure its contingency plan must be unique. This paper also shows an evacuation process in the form of a flowchart for ease of use in the event of an emergency

Evaluating a “wicked problem”: A conceptual framework on seaport resiliency in the event of weather disruptions

Seaport infrastructure by virtue of its location can be severely impacted from disruptive adverse weather events. Disruptive adverse events range from long-term changes such as sea level rise caused by climate change to short-term impacts such as hurricanes. This paper proposes a new conceptual framework for evaluating how ports currently strategize against the risks associated with these potential events and how they plan to ensure port resiliency. Resiliency is defined as the port\u27s ability to resume normal operations at pre-disruptive performance levels after a disruptive adverse event. Further, port resiliency also includes a port\u27s ability to maintain normal operations and performance over a long period of disruptive adverse change. Protecting ports from the impact of adverse weather events is a “wicked problem.” A wicked problem is one where the planning for adverse events is difficult or impossible to solve because of incomplete, contradictory, and changing requirements that are often difficult to recognize. This “wicked problem” context helps port managers to view decisions made on port resiliency in terms of mitigation and minimization of the extent and duration of the negative consequences associated with major disruptions rather than a solution mindset. To achieve this goal, we propose a four step framework: (1) collecting and analyzing historical records on past events, (2) recognizing and managing stakeholders\u27 expectations, (3) developing ever changing resilience strategies, and (4) implementing these strategies with flexibility

State of the Practice: A Review of the Application of OR/MS in Freight Transportation

Freight transportation is an important part of the global supply chain. As distances shipped grow and supply chains become more complex and fragile, operations research (OR) can play an important role in improving the efficiency and robustness of supply networks. This article describes the state of the practice in OR and freight transportation, highlighting recent successful and widely used analytical techniques in oceanic transportation and port operations, and barge, freight rail, intermodal, truckload, less than truckload, and air freight transportation, as well as the use of OR techniques in third-party logistics

Scheduling Twin Yard Cranes in a Container Block

Annually, millions of containers enter and exit the stacking area of a terminal. If the stacking operations are not efficient, long ship, train, and truck delays will result. To improve the stacking operations, new container terminals, especially in Europe, decouple the landside and seaside by deploying twin automated stacking cranes. The cranes cannot pass each other and must be separated by a safety distance. We study how to schedule twin automated cranes to carry out a set of container storage and retrieval requests in a single block of a yard. Storage containers are initially located at the seaside and landside input/output (I/O) points of the block. Each must be stacked in a specific location of the block, selected from a set of open locations suitable for stacking the storage container. Retrieval containers are initially located in the block and must be delivered to the I/O points. Based on the importance and acceptable waiting times of different modes of transport, requests have different priorities. The problem is modeled as a multiple asymmetric generalized traveling salesman problem with precedence constraints. The objective is to minimize the makespan. We have developed an adaptive large neighborhood search heuristic to quickly compute near-optimal solutions. We have performed extensive computational experiments to assess the performance of the heuristic including validation at a real terminal. It obtains near-optimal solutions for small instances. For large instances, it is shown to yield better solutions than CPLEX truncated after four hours, and it outperforms other heuristics from practice by more than 24% in terms of makespan. The average gaps between our heuristic and optimal solutions for relaxed problems are less than 3%