Sharif Digital Repository

Large amounts of relief resources such as water, tents, medical equipment and fuel after a major disaster need to reach the affected people. Satisfying the needs of victims is crucial to the success of crisis relief operations, as a lack of relief resources can lead to the suffering and loss of lives of victims. According to studies, large-scale catastrophes have occurred frequently in recent years. Therefore, it is necessary to pay more attention to the management of post-crisis resources. Since the distribution of emergency resources depends largely on the efficiency and effectiveness of logistics operations, the primary objectives include minimizing logistics time and cost, minimizing... 

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... 

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 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 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... 

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... 

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... 

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,... 

The purpose of this study is to solve the problem of allocating relief teams to reopen damaged roads and remove debris from damaged areas after the earthquake for large cities. In the deteriorated areas of large metropolises, severe earthquakes may damage links, which causes some nodes to separate from the network. In this research, by using an Ant System meta-heuristic algorithm, a joint problem of damaged link restoration and demolished zone debries removal problem for search and rescue of the trapped population in an earthquake is solved. Ant System parameters are calibrated, and sensitivity analyses are done for the number of relief teams, earthquake intensity. The results of 1000... 

The growing number of disasters in recent years has become a significant threat to hospital buildings' resilience and preparedness. Besides, the stochastic nature of these disasters and the complexity of the hospital building systems exacerbate the difficulty of making appropriate decisions during and after disasters. To address the issue, this research proposes a novel model that utilizes the capabilities of Bayesian Networks (BNs) and Building Information Modeling (BIM). This model helps decision-makers in hospitals and medical centers measure various effects of disasters on utility systems and analyze the consequences of their decisions. The capabilities of the proposed model are tested... 

This thesis proposes a probabilistic framework to increase situational awareness about serviceability of infrastructure systems, and extend and distribution of losses in the posthazard state of communities. Maintaining situational awareness is the first and foremost step in prioritizing search and rescue operations and organizing resources. This is a challenging task due to the uncertainties that exist in infrastructure systems’ performance after occurrence of a hazardous event. These uncertainties gradually diminish as further information is received. Therefore, a probabilistic framework is the necessary element for disaster management. This framework must be able to update initial beliefs... 

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... 

This study provides a probabilistic framework for assessing and quantifying flood damage to infrastructure. This framework models the state of the community's infrastructure after the occurrence of possible floods in five steps. The first step is to model the hazard using a set of models that determine the characteristics of potential floods. The second step is to model and estimate the damage to community buildings and infrastructure. In the third step, infrastructure serviceability is modeled. The infrastructures that are modeled in this study are water distribution network, power network, transportation networks and industrial facilities for processing agricultural products. In the fourth... 

Throughout history, natural and unnatural disasters have caused great financial and human losses to human beings. Although these incidents are sometimes unpredictable and inevitable, with proper management, the casualties can be reduced. To optimally manage disaster response operations, it is essential to understand people’s vehicular movements in chaotic situations. This can be achieved by examining previous earthquakes. In the post-earthquake conditions, as the network experiences sudden and heavy loading, not only the debris falling on the roads but also the traffic congestion caused by the scared people will cause the links to close, and this will disrupt the relief and rescue... 

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...