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</o:shapelayout></xml><![endif]--></head><body lang=EN-US link=blue vlink=purple><div class=WordSection1><p class=MsoNormal align=center style='text-align:center;text-autospace:none'><b><i><span style='font-size:12.0pt;font-family:"Times New Roman","serif"'>PhD Dissertation Defense<o:p></o:p></span></i></b></p><p class=MsoNormal align=center style='text-align:center;text-autospace:none'><b><span style='font-size:12.0pt;font-family:"Times New Roman","serif"'>A Network Flow Optimization Approach for Emergency Evacuation Route Planning<o:p></o:p></span></b></p><p class=MsoNormal align=center style='text-align:center;text-autospace:none'><b><span style='font-size:12.0pt;font-family:"Times New Roman","serif"'><o:p> </o:p></span></b></p><p class=MsoNormal align=center style='text-align:center;text-autospace:none'><span style='font-size:12.0pt;font-family:"Times New Roman","serif"'>Mohammad Reza Baharnemati<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class=MsoNormal align=center style='text-align:center;text-autospace:none'><span style='font-size:12.0pt;font-family:"Times New Roman","serif"'>Major Professor: Dr. Gino Lim<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class=MsoNormal align=center style='text-align:center;text-autospace:none'><b><span style='font-size:12.0pt;font-family:"Times New Roman","serif"'><o:p> </o:p></span></b></p><p class=MsoNormal align=center style='text-align:center;text-autospace:none'><b><span style='font-size:12.0pt;font-family:"Times New Roman","serif"'>Monday November 7, 2011, 1:00 P.M. IE Conference Room, Engineering Bldg 2, Room E214<o:p></o:p></span></b></p><p class=MsoNormal style='text-autospace:none'><b><span style='font-family:"Times New Roman","serif"'>Abstract<o:p></o:p></span></b></p><p class=MsoNormal style='text-autospace:none'><span style='font-family:"Times New Roman","serif"'>Every year a large number of disasters take place all around the world and thousands of people are affected by them. A disaster can cause severe suffering and tremendous loss in terms of human life and property damage. Having a proper emergency procedure is one of the most effective ways to deal with a disaster and minimize the risks and consequences of the disaster. One of the preventive actions that should be considered in the emergency processes is evacuation. To perform an effective evacuation, a complete evacuation route plan is required. To prepare an evacuation route plan, we first develop a capacitated dynamic network flow model, called arc-based model, to find a set of evacuation paths with fixed flow rates which maximizes the total number of evacuated people through a given evacuation network over a discrete finite time horizon. Due to computational complexity of finding an optimal solution for the arc-based model in real world<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class=MsoNormal style='text-autospace:none'><span style='font-family:"Times New Roman","serif"'>networks, a path-based network flow optimization model is proposed to achieve the maximum throughput of the network through a set of paths. A column generation scheme is developed to solve the path-based model. Next, we address a new problem known as information-based rerouting for evacuation route planning which incorporates occurrence of incidents on the evacuation network during evacuation. We propose an optimization model to find alternative paths and update the flow rates. Finally, we developed a robust optimization model to include uncertainty involved in the number of evacuees. We propose three different robust counterparts that are computationally scalable and tractable.</span><o:p></o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal><o:p> </o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal><o:p> </o:p></p></div></body></html>