Event Details

STOR-i Masterclass, Professor Laura Albert, University of Wisconsin-Madison - Public Sector Operations Research

Public Sector Operations Research

Public sector applications, such as those in fire and emergency medical services, are complex systems that span people, processes, vehicles, and critical infrastructure. Researchers have been developing optimization models to locate vehicles such as fire engines and ambulances and spatial queuing models for analyzing public safety vehicle deployment decisions for nearly 50 years. A body of literature for locating and dispatching vehicles has grown to lift simplifying assumptions and address important issues overlooked in the early research models in this area. Public sector applications such as homeland security, disaster preparedness and response, and critical infrastructure protection have received a growing amount of attention from operational researchers in recent years. However, many research challenges remain.

In this STOR-i masterclass, we will study the evolution of operational research in the public sector with application to public safety, homeland security, and disasters. Technical topics include network optimization problems, facility location and covering models; network design, restoration, and interdiction models; spatial queuing models; and discrete event simulation. Policy insights as well as issues relating to putting the results into practice in real-world settings in the United States and abroad will be discussed.

Monday 24 February

14:00-16:00 Lecture1 Bowland North SR10

Tuesday 25 February

10:00-12:00 Lecture2 Furness LT3

14:00-16:00 Lecture3 Bowland North SR10