Dr. Medal and Dr. Nicholas Hall (Ohio State) will be co-chairing the Doctoral Student Colloquium (DSC) at the 2020 INFORMS Annual Meeting on November 6-7 in National Harbor, MD. Dr. Medal was the chair for the 2019 INFORMS DSC.
In my dissertation, I developed models for locating and protecting facilities that are subject to disruptions caused by attacks from an adversary (i.e., interdictions) or random events (e.g., natural disasters). In my dissertation, I developed models for locating and protecting facilities that are subject to disruptions caused by attacks from an adversary (i.e., interdictions) or random events (e.g., natural disasters). Complementing my dissertation, I have done other work on designing and protecting networks. One of my Ph.D. students and I have completed a study on using fault trees to model disruptions in a supply chain. We are currently working on developing algorithms for optimizing the allocation of resources to minimize the probability that a fault occurs.
I have also used network interdiction modeling to study the vulnerability of wireless networks. Although the field of network interdiction has produced a mature set of modeling and algorithmic tools, these models and algorithms are tailored for “wired” networks, such as supply chains and road networks, and not for wireless ones. Thus, there is a need to extend the concept of interdiction modeling to the wireless domain.
Dr. Medal has been named as an associate editor for the journal Networks, a premier journal in the area of network optimization algorithms.
Mike Sherwin joined the Industrial Engineering Department at the University of Pittsburgh as an Assistant Professor in January 2020. Mike teaches courses focused on supply chain management, design of experiments, facility layout, and material handling. He is also pursuing research in the areas of engineering education, supply chain reliability, and predictive analytics. (Faculty Page |Personal […]
Networks can also be a useful way of modeling the spread of a wildfire. A landscape can be divided into cells and the midpoints of the cells form the nodes of the network. Arcs connect nodes to their neighbors and the weight on an arc represents the time a fire takes to travel between nodes, based on landscape and weather characteristics. Thus, we have applied network interdiction to the problem of allocating resources to a landscape prior to a fire in order to prevent fire outbreak.
My first foray into cyber security was a study of how to control virus outbreaks within a network. There has been a considerable amount of work done on how contagion spreads through a network; however, there is been much less work on how to design control strategies based on a network’s topology.
One of my former students, Aaron Hoskins, and I have done some work on using optimization to improve the ability of satellites to monitor an event (e.g, a wildfire). We developed several different stochastic programming models for locating ground stations that download data from satellites (Hoskins and Medal, 2019) and optimizing the orbital parameters of a constellation of satellites (Hoskins and Medal, 2017). Extending the work of Hoskins and Medal (2017), which only considered data collection during the ascending pass of a satellite’s orbit, we also developed a model for collecting data during both the ascending and descending passes (Hoskins and Medal, 2020).
Dr. Medal is the co-PI of a grant titled “Machine-Learning-Enabled Modeling for High-Dimensional Dynamics of Materials Processes,” and funded by the StART seed funding program organized by the Science Alliance at the University of Tennessee (https://scialli.utk.edu/)
I have done a bit of work on optimizing the design of transportation networks, mostly under the theme of usability. In a project funded by the U.S. Department of Transportation, we examined how to optimally retrofit a transportation network to make it more pedestrian-friendly (Rashidi et al., 2016). To accomplish this, we formulated an optimization model for optimally allocating limited resources to different traffic calming actions such as adding sidewalks and crosswalks. In another paper, we developed a model for designing a transportation network to make it more accessible to pedestrians (Li, Medal, and Qu, 2019).