Panos M. Pardalos will make a plenary talk on the International Conference: AAAS-2013

Panos M. Pardalos will  make  a plenary talk on the International Conference: AAAS-2013, which  takes place 17 February 2013 at 4 p.m.  in Boston (Hynes Convention Center), room 208. The theme of  his talk is " Assessing the Vulnerability of Evacuation Plans via Critical Element Detection"

Bio:  Panos M. Pardalos serves as Distinguished Professor of Industrial and Systems Engineering at the University of Florida. He is also an affiliated faculty member of the Computer and Information Science Department, the Hellenic Studies Center, and the Biomedical Engineering Program. He is also the Director of the Center for Applied Optimization. Dr. Pardalos is a world leading expert in global and combinatorial optimization. His recent research interests include network design problems, optimization in telecommunications, e-commerce, data mining, biomedical applications, and massive computing.

Abstract:  A principal characteristic that an emergency evacuation plan must have is to be robust with respect to possible disruptions over the infrastructure network. We propose a mathematical formulation aimed to detect the set of critical elements (roads, bridges, intersections, etc.) of an evacuation plan. Identifying these elements is of importance, as they can be reinforced to prevent a collapse during an evacuation, or they can be used to analyze alternative routes or contingency plans. For instance, in the context of Superstorm Sandy, that could have extended to detecting paths that were critical to the evacuation plan, so as to assess the plan robustness and mitigate the impact of potential failures.