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Preparedness for many health and safety disasters in the Pacific Rim region requires appropriate caching of critical resources to be redistributed as needed during an incident. While the algorithms under development by the GOSR project are applicable to a variety of emergency response resources, we have focused their initial development on the distribution of medical supplies in the Puget Sound Region.
The GOSR project team has collaborated with regional medical response personnel to develop algorithms for determining the optimal locations of caches and inventory levels of medical supplies before an event occurs, to balance the risk of incurring earthquake damage themselves yet providing fast distribution to hazardous areas.
In this preparedness phase, stochastic programming models enable the selection of the warehouse sites and determine their inventory levels by balancing of risks of disasters with timely delivery of medical supplies.
In the response phase, a real time optimization model provides the assignment and routing of vehicles due to the updated transportation conditions and current demand and supply information.
After the onset of the disaster the allocation of medical supplies to hospitals is optimized to reduce delivery time, recognizing that the transportation roads may have sustained damage. The transportation model transforms the transportation orders to the optimal assignment and routing of vehicles.
The GOSR algorithms have been integrated into PARVAC's RimSim incident simulation system to enable resource allocation planning activities. In the planning phase, the RimSim participant uses the Stochastic Programming Model for the optimal location and inventory levels of warehouses. In the response phase, as the real time supply and demand information are being collected, GOSR provides real time decision support to the player for supply transportation decisions.
For the seamless integration of two environments, we have been developing the model code in an object-oriented language using the libraries of the OPLCPLEX software, a state-of-the art mathematical modeling and optimization tool.
Benefits
Decisions to support preparedness and response activities for disaster management are challenging due to the uncertainties of events and complications in the availability of real time data.
The GOSR project develops optimization models for the location and allocation of medical supplies to be used in emergencies in the Seattle region, an area vulnerable to critical infrastructure damage due to earthquakes. These optimization models are an important component of the "analytics" in visual analytics systems.
GOSR Supply Redistribution: Distribution of cached medical supplies from warehouses to Seattle area hospitals during a simulated disaster, as visualized in PARVAC's RimSim testbed.
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Collaborators
- Pacific Rim Visualization and Analytics Center (PARVAC)
- UW Medical Center
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