In an era where people health has been unjustly impacted by their income, age, gender, education, ethnicity, and socioeconomic status, programs like the Recreovía and the Ciclovía Recreativa serve the entire community regardless of any of these factors with a health-focused approach. Accordingly, the necessity to bring healthy living into people’s daily lives has been and will continue to be a significant challenge for public health practitioners and city officials. This challenge inevitably involves assigning resources innovatively and efficiently using analytics-based techniques towards the goal of having healthier and sustainable cities. See the video of the RecreoBOG project

Contact: Andrés L. Medaglia

Related work and links:

• EpiAndes research group at Universidad de los Andes.
• Medaglia, A. L. (2017). Promoting health and wellness through OR. In IFORS News. OR-Impact Section. 11(4). ISSN: 2223-4373
• IFORS Prize for Operations Research (OR) in Development (2017). 21th Conference of the International Federations of Operational Research Societies (IFORS). Quebec City (Canada) .
• Abolghasem, S., Solano, F., Bedoya, C. D., Navas, L.P., Ríos. A. P., Pinzón. E. A., Medaglia, A. L., Sarmiento, O. L. (2018). A robust DEA-centric location-based decision support system for expanding Recreovía hubs in the city of Bogotá (Colombia). International Transactions in Operational Research.
• Abolghasem, S., Gómez-Sarmiento, J., Medaglia, A. L., Sarmiento, O. L., González, A. D., Díaz del Castillo, A., Rozo-Casas, Juan F., Jacoby, E. (2018). A Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA)-centric decision support system for evaluating Ciclovía-Recreativa (CR) programs in the Americas. Socio-Economic Planning Sciences. 61:90–101.
• Sefair, J. A., Molano, A., Medaglia, A. L., and Sarmiento, O. L. (2011). Locating neighborhood parks with a lexicographic multiobjective optimization method. In Community-Based Operations Research: Decision Modeling for Local Impact and Diverse Populations. Michael P. Johnson (Ed.). International Series in Operations Research & Management Science, Volume 167, Part 2, 143-171.

Rainwater harvesting is the process of collecting, storing, and distributing rainwater for reuse, rather than allowing it to run off. Greywater recycling consists of purifying processes that remove contaminants present in wastewater coming from faucets, showers, baths, clothes washing, and dishwashing, so that it can be reused, instead of becoming inlet wastewater for municipal wastewater treatment plants. In urban areas, rainwater harvesting and greywater recycling systems provide additional water supplies for houses, buildings, and industries, and also help to mitigate flooding events and pollution. Construction companies are looking for eco-friendly systems that benefit the environment while being profitable. This paper proposes a decision support system (DSS) for the design of rainwater harvesting and greywater recycling system (RHGRS) in residential construction projects. The DSS uses optimization to support construction companies in the design of a RHGRS that minimizes construction and operational costs. With the underlying optimization routine, the DSS addresses both the challenges of deciding whether to construct or not a RHGRS for a residential unit and its minimum-cost design. It is expected that the DSS will help construction companies to make decisions toward sustainable and eco-friendly cities.

Contact: Andres Medaglia

Increasing urbanization is an undeniable feature of this century. Addressing urban growth under severely constrained resources is a task that demands comprehensive efforts in planning towards efficient development: optimizing the treatment of resources (natural, economic) and residues (emissions, waste, idle time), for which an accurate understanding of urban processes is necessary. While network analysis and systems dynamics provide tools to describe and understand relationships within and between stakeholders and the physical world, statistical models and simulation allow to estimate and predict behavior patterns that enable better decision making. Qualitative and quantitative descriptions of urban problems are translated to optimization models that provide support in the design of public policy and strategic planning in problems such as: land-use regulation; incentives and planning for renewable energy adoption; configuration and planning for transportation systems; resource allocation for disaster preparedness.

Contact: Camilo Gomez

Resilience of infrastructure networks is key for urban development, mostly when understood as the way in which physical systems help societies prosper. In this sense, infrastructure engineering must incorporate the societal aspects related to infrastructure operation, namely: the organizations involved in infrastructure operation (government, agencies, contractors, regulators), and the general public who uses and benefits from these systems. The explicit consideration of these parties impacts the modeling and analysis of infrastructure systems with regards to how decisions are made (depending on the type of stakeholder, and its organizational constraints) and how the impact is measured (depending who the constituents are). For example, in the context of risk assessment and management, organizational constraints may imply stakeholders with divergent interests, or centralized vs. decentralized resource availability, decision processes, and operations, etc.; regarding user-related aspects, socio-economic vulnerability may have an impact on how different segments of the population experience the (lack of) service/benefits of an infrastructure system. Incorporating these aspects may affect the definition of performance metrics of interest and, consequently, influence risk management policies. In this project, we propose recovery strategies for interdependent networks of power, gas, and water in Shelby County, TN (USA), considering operators’ as well as societal objectives within an optimization framework.

Contact: Camilo Gomez

A problem setting where strategic network design is of foremost importance, is the preparedness for wildfire events. Once a wildfire starts, pre-positioned resources (e.g., tools) are delivered to operation centers where tactical decisions are made by firefighters. One of the key drivers for allocating the resources are the fire ignition points and the fire spread, which are stochastic in nature. By using simulated scenarios and a two-stage stochastic program, we have been able to decide upon strategic decisions related to locating facilities and their inventory levels; along with the tactical transportation and distribution decisions within a time-space network that allows for realistic size problems such as those arising in Bogotá.

Photo by usfwshq / CC BY

Contact: Andrés L. Medaglia and Camilo Gómez