Optimizing Locations and Scales of Emergency Warehouses Based on Damage Scenarios

Choosing the locations and the capacities of emergency warehouses for the storage of relief materials is critical to the quality of services provided in the wake of a largescale emergency such as an earthquake.This paper proposes a stochastic programming model to determine disaster sites’locations as well as their scales by considering damaged scenarios of the facility and by introducing seismic resilience to describe the ability of disaster sites to resist earthquakes.The objective of the model is to minimize fixed costs of building emergency warehouses,expected total transportation costs under uncertain demands of disaster sites and penalty costs for lack of relief materials.A local branching(LB)based solution method and a particle swarm optimization(PSO)based solution method are proposed for the problem.Extensive numerical experiments are conducted to assess the efficiency of the heuristic according to the real data of Yunnan province in China.

Seismic Vulnerability Assessment from Earthquake Damages Historical Data Using Constrained Optimization Technique

This present work falls within the context of efforts that have been made over the past many years, aimed in improving the seismic vulnerability modelling of structures when using historical data. The historical data describe the intensity and the damages, but do not give information about the vulnerability, since only in the ’90 the concept of vulnerability classes was introduced through the EMS92 and EMS98 scales. Considering EMS98 definitions, RISK-UE project derived a method for physical damage estimation. It introduced an analytical equation as a function of an only one parameter (Vulnerability Index), which correlates the seismic input, in term of Macroseismic Intensity, with the physical damage. In this study, we propose a methodology that uses optimization algorithms allowing a combination of theoretical-based with expert opinion-based assessment data. The objective of this combination is to estimate the optimal Vulnerability Index that fits the historical data, and hence, to give the minimum error in a seismic risk scenario. We apply the proposed methodology to the El Asnam earthquake (1980), but this approach remains general and can be extrapolated to any other region, and more, it can be applied to predictive studies (before each earthquake scenarios). The mathematical formulation gives choice for regarding, to the optic of minimizing the error, either for the: 1) very little damaged building (D0-D2 degree) or 2) highly damaged building (D4-D5 degree). These two different kinds of optics are adapted for the people who make organizational decisions as for mitigation measures and urban planning in the first case and civil protection and urgent action after a seismic event in the second case. The insight is used in the framework of seismic scenarios and offers advancing of damage estimation for the area in which no recent data, or either no data regarding vulnerability, are available.