Topics in fuel distribution and flood mitigation

This dissertation focuses on developing solution approaches for logistics and transportation problems in disaster management and humanitarian applications motivated by real-world applications. We focus on developing improved preparedness and response methods for two kinds of humanitarian applications and evaluating these methods with real-world data.

First, we have developed approaches for storing and distributing fuel to reduce the impact of disasters on islands. While most disaster-related studies focus on the mainland, this research fills this gap by providing distribution models appropriate for islands. After a disaster on an island, there is often an increased demand for fuel because islands often do not have refineries, and it could take several weeks for ships to arrive with more fuel. This study proposes a two-tier optimization approach to, first, determine how to allocate, preposition, and distribute fuel to the different regions (Chapter 1). Tier 1 focuses on the first few days after a disaster when there is no fuel available to the island other than what existed prior to the disaster. The results highlight the importance of establishing new locations with lower risk to preposition fuel. Next, we investigate how to strategically use ships to supplement the fuel after a disaster (Chapter 2). Tier 2 evaluates the strategic use of ships to reduce the arrival time of the shipments from outside sources. These results highlight the importance of using standby ships for fuel distribution.

Second, we have studied how to identify the best roads and bridges in a road transportation network to strengthen to enable travel from population centers to health-care facilities (HFCs) after a flood event (Chapter 3). Floods can deteriorate and block transport systems, leading to loss of access to HFCs. To mitigate these consequences, it is crucial to determine how changes to transportation infrastructure, such as road improvements, can improve access to emergency service facilities. The objective of this research, which addresses a pre-disaster planning problem to improve the residents accessibility to HCFs, is to minimize their travel times subject to budget and capacity restrictions. This work requires the use of geographic information systems (GIS) tools. Accordingly, we have used ArcGIS software to capture spatial data, analyze mapped data, visually dis-play geographical data, and demonstrate solutions. We develop techniques for reducing the problem size on large road networks.

In our study of two cities in Iowa, we demonstrate that the roads that are consistently selected for being upgraded are mostly the residential roads that guarantee accessibility within residential areas, even if they are far from HCFs. While a substantial number of papers in the literature define the available budget levels as the total number of upgradeable roads, our results revealed the flaw in those methods by showing that upgrading more miles of roads does not always yield a larger number of roads.