6th International Conference on Dynamics of Disasters

Organization

General Chairs

Ilias S. Kotsireas (email: ✉)
Professor, Wilfrid Laurier University, Waterloo, Canada

Anna Nagurney (email: ✉)
Eugene M. Isenberg Chair in Integrative Studies, University of Massachusetts, Amherst, MA, USA

Panos M. Pardalos (email: ✉)
Chief Research Officer - TOXEUS Systems, LLC, USA
Distinguished Emeritus Professor, University of Florida, Gainesville, FL, USA

Stefan Pickl (email: ✉)
Professor, Universität der Bundeswehr, Neubiberg, Germany

Program Committee Chairs

Maude Josée Blondin (email: ✉)
Université de Sherbrooke, Québec, Canada

Chrysafis Vogiatzis (email: ✉)
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Illinois, USA

Conference Program

The program of the conference will be announced upon notification of acceptance in May 2023.

PLENARY TALKS

PLENARY TALK

Cosmic storms and human catastrophe mitigation: Predicting space weather
Xenophon Moussas, University of Athens, Greece

Abstract: The Sun is the only star that affects our planet and lifes. Our star emits continuously the solar wind, a magnetized supersonic plasma that creates a huge bubble, the heliosphere, our neighbourhood in the Galaxy. The environments of the Earth and other planets are affected continuously by the solar wind. In parallel with the solar wind the Sun creates energetic particles, low energy cosmic rays, that greatly affect living creatures that might be in a spacecraft, on the Moon or Mars, or even in a plane going from Athens to California or Canada passing close to the magnetic pole of the Earth following the shortest distance a great circle that is the optimum journey. At times the Sun produces intense solar flares accompanied with deadly energetic particles that fill up part of the heliosphere. Following a solar flare, a coronal mass ejection (CME) as the fast magnetic ejecta of the Sun are called there is a cosmic storm, a geomagnetic storm, a solar storm as they are called affects the Earth and humans. The journeys of airliners have to change to avoid the high intensities of energetic particles that become very intense near magnetic poles of the Earth, because the doses of radiation they will receive can even be deadly, and certainly extremely dangerous especially for young women. The extremely fast, itensed solar wind that comes from energetic events at times hits the Earth and can have serious effects on a multitude of human activities and even our health. Solar wind and energetic particle conditions have impact on Earth's Climate, directly affecting the ionosphere, they induce electric power transmission currents with deadly implications at time, they confuse GPS systems, long distance telecommunications, HF radio communications, satellite communications and the expansion of the atmosphere drags satellites changing their position and even destroying them. Humans predict the space weather, as the conditions of the interplanetary medium are called, to avoid the problems caused by cosmic storms. The University of Athens, the Observatoire de Paris, the University of Ioannina, the University of Thessaly run the solar radio spectrograph ARTEMIS J-L. Steinberg at Thermopylae, Greece, monitors solar radio bursts associated with solar energetic phenomena for almost 20 years in our attempts to predict space weather.

Bio: Professor Xeonophon Moussas is a retired Professor of Space Physics who has supervised more than 35 PhD theses and has authored and co-authored more than 110 publications. He has served in a number of distinguished positions, including as the Head of the Space Physics group of the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens (1980-2013), as the Director of the Astrophysics Laboratory of the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens (1985-2013) and the Director of the Observatory of the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens (2011-2013). He has authored four books on Space Physics and the Antikythera Mechanism. Notably, he has also led worldwide exhibitions including ones at the NASA Kennedy Space Center, at the Children Museum of Manhattan, in UNECSO/Paris, at Drexel University, at the University of London (Goldsmiths College), at the University of Birmingham, at the University of Reading, at the Gustavianum Archaeological Museum of Upscale, at the Olzstyn Planetarium and Observatory (Poland), in the Library of Alexandria, as well as in other places in Algeria, Australia, Egypt, France, Germany, Italy, Portugal, Russia, and many in Greece. His exhibitions are available in many languages due to their popularity.

PLENARY TALK

Disaster scenarios with discrete sequences: Using combinatorics for enhanced disaster preparedness
Dimitris E. Simos, SBA Research, Vienna, Austria

Abstract: For both man made and non-man made disasters preparation is very important – preparation can be in multiple forms: exercises, scenario analysis and simulation. In this talk, we explore the application of combinatorial methods to disaster exercise generation in order to guarantee diversity, severity and efficiency and also illustrate the instantiation of an overall disaster modelling framework with examples from different disaster domains. Resulting scenarios can then be implemented regardless of types of disasters e.g. fire, floods, cyber disasters in disaster management and the corresponding operational measures from concerned stakeholders, such as serious games (planspiele). Joint work with Klaus Kieseberg and Bernhard Garn.

Bio: Dr. Simos received his bachelor’s degree in Mathematics (2006) from the University of Athens. He holds a master’s degree in Applied Mathematical Sciences (2007) and a PhD in Discrete Mathematics and Combinatorics (2011), both obtained from the National Technical University of Athens. He has further obtained his habilitation degree in Applied Computer Science (2021) from Graz University of Technology. He also held the status of a Marie Curie Fellow within a 3-year ERCIM grant (2012-2015) awarded by the European Commission. In particular, after his PhD and before joining SBA Research, he was an ERCIM/Marie Curie Post-Doctoral Fellow within Project-Team SECRET of INRIA Paris-Rocquencourt research center working on the design and analysis of cryptographic algorithms, especially through the study of the involved discrete structures. As of 2021, Dr. Simos is Associate Professor (non-tenured track, venia docendi for Applied Computer Science) with Graz University of Technology. He has been an adjunct lecturer with TU Wien and a distinguished guest lecturer with Graz University of Technology. He holds a guest researcher appointment with the US National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), where he is also a research member of its Working Group on Automated Combinatorial Testing for Software (ACTS), and has been a visiting scholar at University of Bergamo. During his career, Dr. Simos has (co)-authored over 100 papers in Discrete Mathematics and their applications to Computer Science and has been awarded the rank of Fellow of the Institute of Combinatorics and its Applications (FTICA) on 2012. His research has received national (FFG), European (FP7, H2020) and international (US NIST) funding. He has been in the organizing or program committee of many international scientific conferences and workshops and is a member of the editorial board of two Springer journals.

PLENARY TALK

Supply chains and critical infrastructure: A nexus of opportunities and vulnerabilities
George Karagiannis, PhD, CEM, Engineering Leadership Group Director, Resilience First

Abstract: Disruptions of critical infrastructure systems and supply chains have spawned some of the most severe, almost iconic, crises in recent history. In today’s globalized economy, infrastructures and supply chains are closely related. Much as infrastructures underpin modern economies, supply chains are the backbone of infrastructure systems. At the same time, supply chains are a linchpin of the modern economy and depend on infrastructure systems to function. This complex nexus of infrastructure systems and supply chains creates new properties that don’t exist in any one separate system. Furthermore, the combination of globalization and climate change is rapidly changing the resilience landscape for infrastructure systems and supply chains. This presentation will explore, from a practitioner’s perspective, the opportunities and vulnerabilities created by the vast interdependencies among infrastructure and supply chains, and delve on the implications for organizational resilience.

Bio: Dr. Karagiannis is the Director of the Engineering Leadership Group, the first of its kind peer to peer engagement platform with a vision to capture the voice of engineering firms worldwide. The Engineering Leadership Group is created and delivered by Resilience First and the International Coalition for Sustainable Infrastructure, members of the Resilience Rising Consortium. From 2019 to 2022, he was Greece's Deputy Secretary-General for Civil Protection. Before that, he was Technical Officer at the European Commission Joint Research Center, where his area of expertise revolved around emergency management, critical infrastructure protection and hybrid threats. Prior to joining the Joint Research Center, he was a Disaster Management Consultant. He has worked in four countries, developed two strategic national risk assessments, helped organize over 60 exercises, developed a dozen emergency operations plans and responded to disasters in the field. He also was a Research Scientist at the Technical University of Crete in Greece, where his interdisciplinary research lay at the intersection of systems engineering and disaster resilience. Dr. Karagiannis earned his Doctorate in Environmental Science and Engineering from Saint-Etienne School of Mines in France. He also holds degrees in Civil Engineering, Disaster Management and Business Administration, and is a Certified Emergency Manager by the International Association of Emergency Managers.

PLENARY TALK

Prescriptive Analytics and Control Towers: A New Dimension of Managerial Decision Making in the Age of Reinforcement and Machine Learning
Stefan Pickl, Universität der Bundeswehr, Neubiberg, Germany

Abstract: Managerial Decision Making will be influenced in the future by certain developments of AI-based expert systems, machine learning techniques as well as different reinforcement learning approaches. Innovative C4I (Command Control Communication and Intelligence) approaches extend the classical C2-network approaches as well as standard expert systems in the sense of Norbert Wiener and lead to a new concept of intelligent control towers. Such control towers are characterized by special “prescriptive analytics” facilities which will be one of the main components of future managerial decision concepts. These concepts combine online algorithmic techniques with new domains of communication structures in order to control a complex system via comfortable managerial dashboards: Prescriptive analytics could be considered as an example how managerial decision making could be seen as a further application for control science and engineering. This new C4I-approach requires a certain hybrid optimization framework (COMTESSA suite). As an example within the research project IRIS (Integrated Reachback Information System), it has been conceptualized and is currently being developed with and for experts in the field of disaster and emergency management.

Bio: Prof. Pickl is the Chair for Operations Research at UBw Munich and the Director of COMTESSA (Core Competence Center for Operations Research Management Tenacity Experience Safety & Security ALLIANCE). He studied mathematics, electrical engineering - with a focus on Complex System Analysis-, and philosophy at TU Darmstadt and EPFL Lausanne from 1987 to 1993, with his doctorate in 1998 with award. Prof. Pickl was then an Assistant Professor at Cologne University (Dr. habil. 2005; venia legendi "Mathematics"), as well as a visiting Professor at University of New Mexico (U.S.A.), University Graz (Austria), University of California at Berkeley (U.S.A.), Naval Postgraduate School (NPS) Monterey (U.S.A.), and a visiting scientist at SANDIA, Los Alamos National Lab, Santa Fe Institute for Complex Systems, and MIT (USA). Recently, he is the lead author in the European Commission's - Risk Management Report 2020 chapter “Communicating Disaster Risk to All” with special focus on “Integrating IT-tools for prevention and response communication systems”. Last, he currently serves as the vice-president of the German Committee for Disaster Prevention.

Dynamics of Disasters — Published Proceedings

The published proceedings from our previous International Conferences on Dynamics of Disasters are available from Springer:

• DOD 2015: Dynamics of Disasters — Key Concepts, Models, Algorithms, and Insights (ISBN: 978-3-319-43709-5).
  The volume covers topics in the realm of disasters, both from natural hazards (such as hurricanes, cyclones, earthquakes) and human-made including wars, chemical spills.
  See also the relevant blog posting by Prof. Anna Nagurney!
• DOD 2017: Dynamics of Disasters — Algorithmic Approaches and Applications (ISBN: 978-3-319-97442-2).
• DOD 2019: Dynamics of Disasters — Impact, Risk, Resilience, and Solutions (ISBN: 978-3-030-64973-9).
• DOD 2021: A special issue is in preparation.

Registration

Registration for DOD 2023 will be in May 2023.