GOALI: Improving Medical Preparedness, Public Safety and Security at Mass Events

该奖项的目的是通过使用优化方法来改善医疗准备，公共安全和大规模集会活动的安全。 全国每年举行500多场群众集会活动，如马拉松。 此类活动可能会发生参与者的医疗紧急情况以及其他与安全相关的事件。这个GOALI项目汇集了西北大学的工程和医学系以及美国银行芝加哥马拉松的组织者，研究通过课程设计减轻危害和风险的方法。就马拉松而言，路线设计决策与路线、救援站、医疗帐篷和志愿者的位置有关。将为课程设计开发多目标模型和解决方案，再加上数据分析和实地观察，以确定安全和医学上可访问的课程。该研究计划基于建模，算法，数据分析和决策者参与等领域的积极整合。如果成功，这项研究的结果将导致各种大规模聚集事件的医疗准备和响应的进步。该项目提供了一个试验台，以推进群众活动的规划和准备的科学和实践，通过在芝加哥马拉松，由教师，学生和从业人员进行反复的实地观察。鉴于整个芝加哥市和马拉松社区内部的联系，研究小组将举办研讨会，将这项研究的最佳实践传播到芝加哥地区和世界各地的其他群众活动。这个GOALI项目代表了运筹学的一个独特应用，将使学生接触到一种新型的规划问题。运筹学建模将导致新的发展，多目标弧路由模型，通过引入新的类弧路由问题，并创建解决这些问题的方法。此外，这项工作将导致新的方法，多目标优化的基础上迭代生成有前途的解决方案与决策者的输入。

The objective of this Grant Opportunity for Academic Liaison with Industry (GOALI) award is to improve medical preparedness, public safety and security at mass gathering events through the use of optimization methodologies. The nation engages in over 500 mass gathering events, such as marathons, each year. Such events are subject to medical emergencies for the participants, and other security related events. This GOALI project brings together engineering and medical faculty at Northwestern University and the organizers of the Bank of America Chicago Marathon to study approaches for the mitigation of hazards and risks through course design. In the case of a marathon, course design decisions are related to the route to be followed and the locations of aid stations, medical tents and volunteers on the course. Multi-objective models and solution approaches will be developed for course design, coupled with data analytics and field observations to identify a safe and medically accessible course. The research plan is based on active integration across the areas of modeling, algorithms, data analysis and decision maker engagement.If successful, the results of this research will lead to advances in medical preparedness and response for a variety of mass gathering events. This project provides a test bed to advance the science and practice of mass event planning and preparedness, through repeated field observations at the Chicago Marathon, conducted by faculty, students, and practitioners. Given connections across city of Chicago and within the marathon community, the research team will host seminars to disseminate best practices from this research to other mass events in the Chicago region and worldwide. This GOALI project represents a unique application of operations research that will expose students to a new type of planning problems. The operations research modeling will lead to new developments in multi-objective arc routing models, by introducing new classes of arc routing problems and creating solution methods for these problems. Further, this work will lead to new approaches to multi-objective optimization based on the iterative generation of promising solutions with input from decision makers.