Please welcome Dr. Emmett Lodree to the ISE Department. Dr. Lodree is an Associate Professor of Operations Management at the University of Alabama. He will discuss the effectiveness of various donation collection strategies where relief supplies are transported from local warehouses into the hands of disaster victims.
As always refreshments are available in 428 Daniels Hall 30 minutes before the seminar begins.
This study is a collaborative effort with Rob Cook, a third year Operations Management PhD Student at the University of Alabama. Motivated by the relief efforts associated with the tornado disaster that impacted Tuscaloosa as well as many other towns in the state of Alabama, this study investigates the effectiveness of various donation collection strategies within the context of lastmile distribution. Last-mile distribution refers to the tail echelon of the humanitarian supply chain in which relief supplies are transported from local warehouses into the hands of disaster victims. The goal is to identify vehicle dispatching policies for collecting donations that keep the unsatisfied demand of disaster victims to a minimum. Specifically, we compare the performance of two common sense heuristic policies to the optimal policy generated by the optimality equations of the associated stochastic dynamic programming model. Both analytical and computational results are discussed.
Emmett Lodree, Jr. is Associate Professor of Operations Management in the Department of Information Systems, Statistics, and Management Science and Culverhouse College of Commerce at the University of Alabama. Prior to joining the University of Alabama in 2009, Dr. Lodree held the position of Assistant Professor of Industrial Engineering at Auburn University from 2004 to 2009, and a position of the same title at North Carolina A&T State University from
002 to 2004. Under the supervision of Professor Cerry Klein, Dr. Lodree earned his PhD in Industrial Engineering from the University of Missouri in 2001. He and his wife of 18 years, both of whom are natives of New Orleans, Louisiana, have three children.
