Event

Seminar :: Food Preparation and Distribution Planning for Pandemic Flu

Ali Ekici, a PhD student in ISyE, will be presenting at the weekly Health Seminar

DATE: Friday, February 29, 2008

TIME: 2:30 PM – 3:30 PM

LOCATION: TSRB, 2nd floor, GVU Cafe

Title: The Pandemic Response: Food Preparation and Distribution Planning for Pandemic Flu

Abstract: Recent incidents of avian flu (H5N1) in Asia and the pandemic influenza cases in the history (1918, 1957 and 1968) suggest that a future pandemic influenza is inevitable. Governments and non-governmental organizations prepare response plans on how to react to a pandemic influenza. In November 1, 2005, President of the United States called for $7.1 billion to prepare the nation to a potential pandemic influenza. In this paper, we study the logistics side of the problem, specifically, food distribution logistics during the pandemic influenza. For this purpose, we develop a disease spread model that assists in estimating the food need at a given time. Then, we develop an integrated solution approach called Dynamic Update Approach to build the food distribution network and run our integrated disease spread and optimization model for the state of Georgia and present the results.

Bio: Ali Ekici is a Ph.D. student in H. Milton Stewart School of Industrial and Systems Engineering at Georgia Institute of Technology. He holds bachelor's degrees in Industrial Engineering and Mathematics from Middle East Technical University in Ankara, Turkey and a master's degree in Operations Research from Georgia Institute of Technology. His main areas of interest are scheduling problems in the printing industry, routing and scheduling applications in emergency situations and cone programming.