A study conducted by a student in the Naveen Jindal School of Management proposes utilizing unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) to optimize efficiency in managing post-disaster operations.
Mohammad Amin Farzaneh, a third-year student in the Management Science PhD program with an Operations Management Concentration, and his co-authors shed new light on how the number of casualties can be reduced after major disasters such as the recent Category 4 Hurricane Ian.
The results of the team’s research were published recently in a paper titled “An integrative framework for coordination of damage assessment, road restoration, and relief distribution in disasters.” The paper was published online by OMEGA – The International Journal of Management Science, a peer-reviewed academic journal, and is slated for print publication in Feb. 2023.
“By prepositioning drones and charging stations when we learn what a hurricane’s path will be, we can be in a position to immediately analyze the road networks afterward to see which ones are damaged,” Farzaneh said. “If you discover the damage sooner and repair those bottlenecks faster, then you can transport more relief to the affected people and you can take the highly injured people to the hospitals using this repaired road network or find an alternate route.”
Another benefit the team discovered during their research was an optimization model that reduced the amount of time it takes the drones to scan the sites, which reduced the associated recovery costs.
“And the other thing which is not being captured in this research but could be considered in the future direction of this research is using those drones themselves to transport medications,” Farzaneh said.
Dr. Ganesh Janakiraman, Ashbel Smith Professor and PhD area coordinator, operations management, said he was happy to see that Farzaneh had completed his research on using UAVs for disaster relief, calling it “timely.”
“While drones are becoming more reliable and cost-effective for retailers to use them for last-mile delivery, Amin’s work has the potential to impact the lives of a large number of people living in disaster-prone areas,” he said. “This is an excellent example of how researchers in the management science discipline can pursue projects of societal value.”
