Modeling Earthquake Vulnerability of Highway Networks

In this study, we investigate the earthquake vulnerability of highway networks whose links are subject to failure. We propose a model called α-conservative failure model that aims to capture the dependency among link failures in the event of an earthquake. According to this model, we calculate a path-based accessibility measure to assess the expected weighted average shortest distance to serve a unit demand after the earthquake. We test the proposed link failure model on a case study of the earthquake vulnerability in Istanbul.     

跨地裂缝墙体开裂形态分析

应用非线性有限元法对跨地裂缝的墙体开裂形态进行了分析,确定出了具有三维活动性的地裂缝垂直穿越墙基时,墙体出现裂缝的位置、倾向、倾角和后期的发展状况,以及随沉降量与张开量比值变化的规律。结果表明:地裂缝垂直穿越围墙时,墙体上出现的裂缝一般有两种形式:一是位于地裂缝下盘的墙顶竖直裂缝,二是出现在地裂缝正上方墙体底部的斜裂缝;当地裂缝两盘的土体活动以水平拉张为主时,墙体底部出现的斜裂缝以高角度向上扩展,当地裂缝两盘的土体活动以差异沉降为主时,墙体底部出现的斜裂缝则以较缓的角度向上扩展,倾向与地裂缝相反;只要地裂缝的上下盘土体有微小的错动,一般2～3mm时,就会引起墙体的破裂,且墙体裂缝扩展迅速,几个毫米的错动量,就能使墙体裂缝扩展数十厘米,甚至贯通整个墙体;墙体斜裂缝在产生初期较为平直,随着裂缝的迅速扩展,端部稍向下弯曲,倾角减缓,整体呈弧弯状。     

Modelling the impact of dam failure scenarios on flood inundation using SPH

Flooding resulting from collapse of a dam is a highly destructive event. It is important to accurately predict the flow behaviour so that potential mitigation strategies can be investigated for disaster management planning. The meshless SPH method has previously been able to model this class of extreme flow events. In this paper, we extend the method to include modelling of dam wall fragments. Collisions between dam wall fragments, between fragments and terrain and full two-way coupling between fragments and the free surface water flow is included. This gives a method that can specifically investigate the impact of the dam wall failure scenario on the subsequent inundation. The historical St. Francis dam failure is used to demonstrate the impact of including the dam fragments. It also provides a means of quantitatively investigating their effect in terms of arrival time and water height at a downstream power station. The scenario with multiple independently timed failures of different parts of the wall (which closely matches the historical failure) gives excellent agreement with the observed data and gives the best match of all failure scenarios. Traditionally such modelling is performed by solving the two dimensional shallow water equations which is not able to capture the three dimensional nature of the flow in earlier stages of dam flooding. We specifically investigate the three dimensional nature of flow structures and formation of multiple downstream hydraulic jumps. These strongly influence water height and therefore control the extent of flooding of tributary valleys.     

Stochastic optimal control on dividend policies with bankruptcy

ABSTRACT

When a firm is at the edge of bankruptcy, it would endeavour to attract bailouts from governments or financial institutions to cast off bad situation. If this effort fails, then the firm would face to sell off their properties to pay their debts to loaners or shareholders. In this paper, from these two cases of bankruptcy, two optimal dividend policies are considered and analysed, respectively. In the case of unrestricted dividend payment rate, a terminal bankruptcy model with non-zero terminal value is put forward. An analytic solution for the optimal objective function, which maximizes the expected value of total discounted dividends before bankruptcy and the residual value at bankruptcy, is provided and verified. As a significant application, a non-terminal bankruptcy problem with bailouts is considered, an explicit solution and the corresponding control policies are also obtained. In the end, some numerical examples are listed and the influence of the recovery rate on the optimal strategies is also discussed.     

Evacuation planning using multiobjective evolutionary optimization approach

In an emergency situation, evacuation is conducted in order to displace people from a dangerous place to a safer place, and it usually needs to be done in a hurry. It is necessary to prepare evacuation plans in order to have a good response in an emergency situation. A central challenge in developing an evacuation plan is in determining the distribution of evacuees into the safe areas, that is, deciding where and from which road each evacuee should go. To achieve this aim, several objective functions should be brought into consideration and need to be satisfied simultaneously, though these objective functions may often conflict with each other.     

The M/G/1 queue with disasters and working breakdowns

In this paper, we analyze the M/G/1 queueing system with disasters and working breakdown services. The system consists of a main server and a substitute server, and disasters only occur while the main server is in operation. The occurrence of disasters forces all customers to leave the system and causes the main server to fail. At a failure instant, the main server is sent to the repair shop and the repair period immediately begins. During the repair period, the system is equipped with the substitute server which provides the working breakdown services to arriving customers. After introducing the concept of working breakdown services, we derive the system size distribution and the sojourn time distribution. We also obtain the results of the cycle analysis. In addition, numerical works are given to examine the relation between the sojourn time and the some system parameters.     

Mass-casualty triage: Distribution of victims to multiple hospitals using the SAVE model

During a mass casualty incident (MCI), to which one of several area hospitals should each victim be sent? These decisions depend on resource availability (both transport and care) and the survival probabilities of patients. This paper focuses on the critical time period immediately following the onset of an MCI and is concerned with how to effectively evacuate victims to the different area hospitals in order to provide the greatest good to the greatest number of patients while not overwhelming any single hospital. This resource-constrained triage problem is formulated as a mixed-integer program, which we call the Severity-Adjusted Victim Evacuation (SAVE) model. It is compared with a model in the extant literature and also against several current policies commonly used by the so-called incident commander. The experiments indicate that the SAVE model provides a marked improvement over the commonly used ad-hoc policies and an existing model. Two possible implementation strategies are discussed along with managerial conclusions.     

A model evaluating effect of disaster warning issuance conditions on “cry wolf syndrome” in the case of a landslide

This study proposes a model that clarifies how disaster warning issuance conditions affect “cry wolf” syndrome. The disaster assumed in this study is landslide caused by heavy rainfall. Local authorities that issue disaster warnings are thought to tend to avoid the situation where casualty occurs without the issuance to residents of a disaster warning. As a result, the issuance conditions may be relaxed. Under this circumstance, however, the residents are thought to tend to ignore disaster warnings, since such warnings are inaccurate. Thus may emerge the “cry wolf” syndrome. In this study, a simulation model that expresses the behaviors of the local authority and the residents has been developed. For the purpose of demonstrating the model, numerical experiments were then carried out. In the numerical experiments, the effects of optimal issuance conditions for disaster warnings on the cost incurred by the resident were evaluated by using assumed parameters for the model.     

Stationary distributions of semistochastic processes with disturbances at random times and with random severity

We consider a semistochastic continuous-time continuous-state space random process that undergoes downward disturbances with random severity occurring at random times. Between two consecutive disturbances, the evolution is deterministic, given by an autonomous ordinary differential equation. The times of occurrence of the disturbances are distributed according to a general renewal process. At each disturbance, the process gets multiplied by a continuous random variable (“severity”) supported on [0,1). The inter-disturbance time intervals and the severities are assumed to be independent random variables that also do not depend on the history.We derive an explicit expression for the conditional density connecting two consecutive post-disturbance levels, and an integral equation for the stationary distribution of the post-disturbance levels. We obtain an explicit expression for the stationary distribution of the random process. Several concrete examples are considered to illustrate the methods for solving the integral equations that occur.     

An exact branch-and-price algorithm for scheduling rescue units during disaster response

In disaster operations management, a challenging task for rescue organizations occurs when they have to assign and schedule their rescue units to emerging incidents under time pressure in order to reduce the overall resulting harm. Of particular importance in practical scenarios is the need to consider collaboration of rescue units. This task has hardly been addressed in the literature. We contribute to both modeling and solving this problem by (1) conceptualizing the situation as a type of scheduling problem, (2) modeling it as a binary linear minimization problem, (3) suggesting a branch-and-price algorithm, which can serve as both an exact and heuristic solution procedure, and (4) conducting computational experiments – including a sensitivity analysis of the effects of exogenous model parameters on execution times and objective value improvements over a heuristic suggested in the literature – for different practical disaster scenarios. The results of our computational experiments show that most problem instances of practically feasible size can be solved to optimality within ten minutes. Furthermore, even when our algorithm is terminated once the first feasible solution has been found, this solution is in almost all cases competitive to the optimal solution and substantially better than the solution obtained by the best known algorithm from the literature. This performance of our branch-and-price algorithm enables rescue organizations to apply our procedure in practice, even when the time for decision making is limited to a few minutes. By addressing a very general type of scheduling problem, our approach applies to various scheduling situations.