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The abstract is the most important section of the thesis because many readers limit most of their reading to abstracts, saving in-depth reading for specific theses. It should give the reader a "preview" of what's to come. The abstract should emphasize new and important aspects of the study or observations. The purpose of the abstract is to allow researchers to decide whether or not to read the whole thesis. The abstract is what researchers read first to decide if the thesis is important, interesting, and it allows them to assess the relevance of a thesis to their own research, without having to read the entire thesis. Thus, it is crucial that the abstract both summarize succinctly the key... 

Examples from recent years, such as Covid-19 disease and earthquakes, show that disasters can have devastating effects on a community.These disasters are divided into two categories: expected and unexpected. decision makers cannot easily determine the time, severity and effects of them. Therefore, they must coordinate their decisions in the pre-disaster and post-disaster stages according to the incomplete information available, and according to the dynamics of the situation, quickly understand and interpret the connections between different decisions. Among the various approaches, the decision support system can explore the variable and unpredictable nature of such issues and enable decision... 

Natural hazards such as earthquake take many lives each year and cause significant damages to infrastructures such as transportation networks. Whether after occurrence of a natural disaster like storm in order to evacuate, or after an abrupt event such as earthquake in order to provide emergency measures, a transportation network should maintain its functionality and performance in an acceptable degree and should recover in an effectively short period of time. In this study, the link or the set of links which their removal causes significant damage to the transportation network are identified. A specific index (N-Q index) has been used to describe the performance of the network. In addition,... 

reparedness and emergency procedure be devised in the event of,and prior to,a disaster. One of these disastersoften accompanying byhuge damages, losses and casualtiesisanearthquake. After such a disaster, several governmental and non-governmental organizations usually start relief operations. They commonly pursue their own agendas and use their own facilities and capabilities to help the people affected without pursuing a central plan. These disintegrated behaviors of involved organizations generate contradictory responses and result in either wasted resources or preventing equitable service for all affected people. Due tothe abovefact, this dissertation proposes amodel for improving... 

In this study, community resilience after a disaster is optimally enhanced for interdependent infrastructures through prioritization of recovery operations considering limited resources. Optimal enhancement of community resilience can be performed at two levels: Pre-disaster and Post-disaster. In the pre-disaster level, resilience enhancement is achieved through optimization of long-term decision making that includes optimized allocation of resources to retrofit of buildings. However, in the post-disaster response and recovery period, allocating resources to retrofit or backup systems is infeasible. Therefore, in the post-disaster level considered in this study, resilience enhancement is... 

Natural disasters, earthquakes in particular, claim many human lives and damage major lifelines such as transportation networks. Transportation networks play an important role in various stages of response to disasters, such as evacuation, search, rescue and reconstruction missions. Hence, special attention must be paid to transportation networks in any disaster management system. Hence, in order to reduce the impacts of earthquakes on denser cities and metropolitan areas, analysis of the resiliency and vulnerability of critical infrastructures such as transportation network, can be used as an effective strategy.The resiliency and vulnerability of transportation network have attract a lot... 

This study presents a Machine Learning framework for post-earthquake structural damage state and economic loss estimation. The framework is proposed to rapidly determine whether a structure is safe or unsafe to be occupied following a seismic event, to predict the detailed structural response, and finally to evaluate the economic loss of the buildings. An extensive database is developed by analyzing twelve low-rise, mid-rise, and high-rise eccentrically braced frames (EBFs) under 44 scaled ground motion records through incremental dynamic analysis (IDA) to train the Machine Learning algorithms. Machine Learning algorithms are employed to classify the structural damage state of the buildings... 

Natural disasters have been with the earth, and felt critical as far back as human history. These incidents are inevitable, but their effects may be controlled. One important problem after a disastrous earthquake is the management of people’s vehicular movements in a chaotic situation. This study is an endeavor to envisage what would possibly happen after such an incident, and how could we possibly control or manage the traffic in such an occasion. We start with the analysis of the online reports of similar past incidents, and try to picture how people react to these events. We try to identify the trip purposes that have been shown to be pursued, and the respective origins and destinations.... 

In this research we study the capacity on insurance industry to respond to catastrophe risk. For this purpose we use insurance factory data from 1383 to 1394 and based on variables such as fire premium, loss, payment and financial data during the period. Estimations were made based on two cases: using raw data and detrend it. The result in both cases indicate that the insurance industry does not have the sufficient capacity to respond to potential loss caused by natural disaster  

In earthquake-prone communities, the post-earthquake functionality of hospitals is crucial. Hospitals can dramatically reduce earthquake casualties if they can remain functional and retain service continuity. A variety of earthquake-induced problems such as damage to hospital components, unavailability of medical staff, disruption in medicine supply, and failure of supporting infrastructure systems can negatively affect the functionality of a hospital. Hospital administrators and facility managers require appropriate tools to assess the effect of these problems on hospital functionality. This research presents a probabilistic framework to assess the functionality of hospitals following... 

The main objective of this research is to use the visual features of damage in evaluating the post-earthquake status of the damaged structures. Structural health monitoring, as a comprehensive approach, includes methods for identifying the damaged structures, estimating damage location, measuring damage extent, and methods for reconstructing and repairing structures. The present study is specifically focused on the second and third stages of structural health monitoring, including “estimating the location of damage” and “measuring the extent of damage”. Various methods for evaluating the condition of earthquake-damaged structures are available in technical literature; one of the most common... 

In the world of today, the high rate of change, instability and uncertainty leave organizations under the constant effect of crises and unforeseen events. The prediction, prevention and control of crises alongside sustained performance and stability are now vital to the survival of organizations. The COVID-19 pandemic has created innumerable challenges for many businesses in Iran, including Small and Midsize Enterprises involved with health tourism, and has placed their subsistence at risk. The concept of Organizational mindfulness can help organizations avert crises and unexpected incidents, while rapidly bringing such events under control and mitigating the associated damage, should they... 

Back then and still now natural calamities have been a serious threat for energy systems. On that front, this thesis constitutes a three-stage mixed integer linear programming (MILP) model to enhance the resilience of power distribution systems to deal with disas-trous events. The proposed model involves in pre-, mid-, and post-event stages. In this con-text, to increase the preparedness of the power distribution system, system operator recon-figures the system by taking benefit of remote-control switches (RCSs), manual switches (MSs), and distributed generations (DGs) before the natural calamity hits. The proposed model contemplates the traveling time of crew teams to the MS sites in order... 

The occurrence of natural disasters and damages caused by them has greatly impacted humans' lives, which reveals need for us to prepare for confrontation with various disasters. For this purpose, in this research, we are seeking to develop a programming model to reduce damages caused by various disasters. This thesis includes 3 main sections. In first section, some major impacts of disasters are reviewed and studied during the past 118 years and some major lessons are summarized based on statistical data analysis. In second section, a 3-demontional probability density function has been developed to categorize different types of disasters. Furthermore, a scaling system is presented to... 

The aim of this study is to evaluate post-earthquake travel behavior in Tehran. After a horrible disaster, like earthquake, people’s travel behavior may change substantially in comparison with normal condition. If people’s travel behavior can be predicted after an earthquake, then authorities can manage travels for emergency medical services in a more efficient way, so the casualties are profoundly diminished. To collect a formation, a questionnaire about socio-economic characteristics of people and their post-earthquake travel behavior was designed. According to the obtained results, time of occurrence and severity of the earthquake are of the utmost importance. So if the earthquake occurs... 

In recent years, climate change due to greenhouse gases caused an increase in frequency and intensity of the natural disasters such as hurricanes, blizzards and floods. Moreover, it is anticipated that such events will increase in the future. As a result, power system decision makers are looking for methods to improve power system resiliency against such natural disasters with low occurrence probability and high impact. In this report, the distribution system resiliency has improved via placing remote control sectionalizing switches and micro grids formation during natural disasters. In this regard, the concept of resiliency and its characteristics along with the effect of remote control... 

The loads in power systems are increasing mainly due to the development of new technologies, population growth, and the arrival of new consumers. This load growth necessitates the planning for expansion of power systems to meet the future load. Transmission expansion planning (TEP) is one of the main power system planning studies that is performed to meet the future load with an acceptable reliability level. On the other hand, in recent years, the integration of distributed energy resources (DERs) into power systems is growing, mainly driven by energy policies and the associated incentives. The impact of the growing integration of DERs into power grids on distribution network planning is... 

In this thesis, we consider the capacitated vehicle routing problem (CVRP) and the split delivery vehicle routing problem (SDVRP), with uncertain travel times and demands in the process of planning vehicle routes for delivering critical supplies to the affected population in need after a disaster. A robust optimization approach, introduced in the literature, is used for CVRP and SDVRP, in which, as Li and Chung have done, five objective functions are considered: minimization of the total number of vehicles deployed (minV), the total travel time/travel cost (minT), the summation of arrival times (minS), the summation of demand-weighted arrival times (minD), and the latest arrival time... 

Structural safety evaluation is an indispensable part of every post-disaster investigation, which should be conducted by inspection teams consisting of experienced structural engineers and trained inspectors. A complete evaluation takes up to three stages of assessment, to quantify and measure the magnitude of damage before proposing an overhaul resolution. According to the current codes of conduct, much of this complex and time-consuming process, especially in the first two stages, is left to the human judgment. To achieve a more uniform and in depth inspection, a new algorithm is presented to limit the arbitrary nature of the human opinion in damage evaluation, using properties of the...