ISA Research Seminar: Vahid Akbari (University of Nottingham)

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Title: Operations Research for Resilient and Sustainable SystemsModels, Methods, and Applications Across Disaster Response, Transportation, and Societal Operations Abstract: Natural disasters such as floods, wildfires, and earthquakes create complex and time-critical operational challenges, where the effective coordination of humanitarian logistics, infrastructure, resources, and emergency services can have a direct impact on affected communities. The SIREN (Safety & Incident Response for building Emergency Networks) project brings together an international consortium of industry and academic partners to develop a platform for improving disaster response through the integration of Geographic Information Systems, artificial intelligence, decision support, and coordinated humanitarian logistics. As part of the UK academic team within SIREN, this seminar presents five Operations Research problems arising from disaster response: casualty transportation, post-disaster road restoration, multi-period relief distribution, wildfire suppression, and the use of drone reconnaissance to support transportation decisions in disrupted networks. These problems illustrate how mathematical optimization and advanced solution approaches can support operational decision-making when resources are limited and conditions are rapidly evolving. The seminar then moves beyond SIREN to present a broader research program concerned with the design of resilient, sustainable, and socially valuable operational systems. Applications include transportation-network electrification, the use of public transportation for donation distribution, food-platform operations, donation collection and redistribution in an uncertain setting, and online ophthalmology clinic scheduling. Although these applications arise in different settings, they share common decision challenges involving network design, resource allocation, routing, scheduling, service accessibility, and the management of trade-offs between operational efficiency and societal outcomes. Collectively, they illustrate how Operations Research can generate methodological advances while addressing consequential practical problems across transportation, digital platforms, humanitarian operations, and healthcare. The seminar concludes by discussing future research directions at the intersection of Operations Research, data-driven decision-making, artificial intelligence, resilience, and sustainability, with particular emphasis on real-world operational data, interdisciplinary research, industry collaboration, and externally funded research. Bio: Vahid Akbari is an Associate Professor of Operations Management at Nottingham University Business School, University of Nottingham, where he also serves as Graduate Programme Director for the MSc in Industrial Engineering & Operations Management. His research sits at the intersection of intelligent decision-making, resilient operations, and sustainable transportation, with a focus on online optimisation, vehicle routing, and humanitarian logistics. Vahid is a work-package leader within SIREN, a £5 million UKRI-funded European consortium advancing emergency network design and disaster response logistics. He has held a Visiting Scholar appointment at the University of Michigan, where he contributed to research on transportation electrification. His work has appeared in journals including Transportation Research Part B and the European Journal of Operational Research.