March 2024
Webinar 1:00 pm -2:00 pm CST, March 8, 2024
About the Webinar
Natural disasters often result in failures of transportation network components and blackouts that imperil the wellbeing of vulnerable populations. In response to these events, resilience hubs have been proposed as a pre-disaster planning strategy to improve access to critical services. This seminar presents an optimization-based approach to locate and configure electric power-generating resilience hubs considering the possibility of failures in transportation and electric power systems. The model’s objective is to identify hub locations and configurations that maximize transportation accessibility to the hubs and maximize the satisfaction of basic energy needs through hub-generated electric power. Objective function formulations that explicitly consider equity goals are presented. Besides a budget constraint, the model accounts for limits on the levels of hub energy generation in relation to community energy demands, and on the transportation network distance of communities to hubs. Three heuristics are presented for the proposed planning problem. The first heuristic is a genetic algorithm (GA) with problem-specific solution generation procedures. The other two heuristics implement greedy search techniques. Numerical experiments were conducted, using data from rural Puerto Rico, to illustrate the application of the proposed model and heuristics, and examine their performance.
Speaker : Daniel Rodríguez-Román Professor Department of Civil Engineering and Surveying University of Puerto Rico, Mayagüez
Dr. Daniel Rodriguez-Roman is a Professor of Civil Engineering at the University of Puerto Rico, Mayagüez. His research primarily focuses on transportation network design problems and travel demand management. He is currently working on projects related to parking and carpool management strategies, transit network and service area design problems, and humanitarian logistics. He has previously worked on the design of road pricing schemes, freight travel demand forecasting, and micromobility travel patterns, among other topics. He obtained his B.S. in civil engineering from the University of Puerto Rico, Mayagüez, his M.S. in Transportation Engineering from the University of California at Berkeley, and his Ph.D. in Transportation Systems Engineering from the University of California at Irvine.