TU Delft, The Netherlands
March 07, 2011, 14:15, Room GC B3 424 (click here for the map)
When a region is threatened by a disaster, like a flood or a fire, people have to be evacuated to avoid as many casualties as possible. A plan (for example containing instructions for the people when to leave and where to go) has to be created to be able to evacuate these people in an efficient way. My research focuses on optimization methods to create these plans under uncertainty. In this seminar, I will introduce some results obtained so far, showing among others the doubled effectiveness of evacuation instructions if they are optimized instead of created by practical rules. Furthermore, I will discuss my objective of my stay at EPFL, which is to study the appropriateness of robust optimization methods to solve the evacuation problem under uncertainty and to apply one of these methods to the problem.