| When an earthquake or other
mass-scale disaster hits, officials and national and local aid organizations
cannot afford to waste time or resources in their efforts to provide temporary
housing to those most affected. Researchers at the Mid-America Earthquake
(MAE) Center, an NSF-funded Engineering Research Center based at the University
of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, have developed a model for optimizing
the allocation of temporary housing in the event of an earthquake.
The model is intended to
help officials minimize social disruption, environmental impact, and post-disaster
vulnerability, while also minimizing public expenditures. The model
employs advanced integer optimization approaches to solve this critical
problem, and has been verified using data from the Northridge, California,
earthquake of 1994.
The model was made available
through MAEviz – an open source software project that makes tools available
to researchers and decision-makers – and through published articles on
the theory and application in journals concerned with disaster management,
operations research, and engineering optimization. Presentations
were also made to the Federal Emergency Management Agency and Innovative
Emergency Management, a FEMA sub-contractor that carries out emergency
management and response planning.
Experts have emphasized that
this approach could have improved the response to Hurricane Katrina, and
could also be applied to other natural and man-made disasters. This
work is an example of how state-of-the-art science can be deployed to solve
a critical societal problem. |
