Emergent Incidents Research Articles

Transferring Simulation of Pollutants in YinLuan River Open Channel under Traffic Accidents

The water diversion project from Luanhe River to Tianjin is a large-scale project, which solved the water shortage of Tianjin city. Because the long water supply open channel along highroads, the traffic emergent incidents bring great potential dangers to the water supply of Tianjin. In this paper, the prediction model of traffic emergent incidents in YinLuan River Open Channel was built and the transferring of pollutants under typical scenes was simulated by EFDC model. The evolution and affective area of pollutant in open channel was obtained. The results provide a scientific basis for the decision makers to take effective measures.

Stochastic incident-management of asymmetrical network-workloads

Traffic incidents constitute a major cause for non-recurrent roadway congestion. This paper proposes a stochastic-programming model for clearing asymmetrical incidents in a network as quickly as possible. A response to an incident is asymmetric when the workloads among response vehicles are uneven due to real-time scheduling considerations. This is to be contrasted with a static (often conservative) allocation of vehicular resources. Such asymmetry, and the attendant efficiency, is attributable to additional services performed while a vehicle takes care of emergent incidents nearby. Other vehicles are simply too far away to be helpful. We articulate a fundamental principle of incident management in a theorem and three corollaries. An elegant (yet practical) corollary suggests that an operator should not dispatch additional response vehicles (say from a depot) when the shortest travel-times to an incident are longer than the remaining work time available from vehicles already at the scene. Otherwise, the maximum number of required vehicles should be dispatched. When executed over all instances of reported incidents on a rolling time horizon, the rule yields the optimal plan. The model is applied toward a network in Central Arkansas for peak and off-peak traffic. It shows that it can properly balance the service requirement of reported incidents with potential ones. Meanwhile, a certain reliability level can be guaranteed by our model—a threshold that can be tightened or relaxed at will. The fast solution time of this linearized model allows for real-time application in the field, as verified by a simulation performed on a Central Arkansas highway network.

Developing a campus mental health resource plan

There has been an accelerated increase in the number of college students experiencing psychological distresses. The variance of the distresses are causing college campuses across the United States to realize the need for organized campus-wide collaborative mental health plans as part of their emergency management operations plan. In this article, the authors outline a method for developing a mental health resource plan (MHRP). Our plan is designed to aid in decreasing emergent and nonemergent mental healthrelated incidents and serve as a guide for addressing distressed students, faculty, and staff. Addressing mental health issues in college campuses across the nation is gaining widespread attention due to recent tragic mental health-related incidents. In an effort to support the initiatives that address mental health on college campuses, in 2008 and 2009, the US Department of Education granted a total of 19 million to us and 42 other higher education institutions to develop, review, or improve campus-based all-hazards emergency management plans, which includes addressing and assessing the mental health needs of students who are at risk of causing harm to themselves or others. As a partial result of this research effort, the authors present a generalized methodology for developing a college campus MHRP that can be used to prevent, prepare, respond, and recover from mental health-related emergency events.