Planlegging og skilting av evakuering fra bygninger

Solli Distriktpsykiatriske Senter på Nesttun huser døgn- og polikliniske avdelinger for personer over 18 år med psykiske lidelser. Sykehuset har et problem med at pasienter ikke alltid finner veien ut igjen av byggene etter endt behandling og har satt i gang et prosjekt med å bedre skilting for å bedre flyt i pasientenes bevegelser inne på sykehuset. I denne sammenheng vil vi også optimere evakueringsplanene for bygningsmassen da skiltingen kanskje baserer seg på en suboptimal evakueringsplan.

De som må evakueres og som beveger seg rundt i bygget er en blanding av de 150 ansatte, 19 innlagte pasienter og omtrent 150 polikliniske pasienter (per dag) som er innom en time annenhver uke for behandling. Dette er pasientgrupper med ulike typer adferd som i tillegg vil kunne være forskjellig fra adferden til pasienter ved f.eks. somatiske avdelinger, men som for det meste har samme fysiske forutsetninger som den generelle befolkningen. 

Denne oppgaven passer godt for en BAN-student. Den innebærer modellering av evakuering av bygninger ved bruk av optimering. En særlig interessant kobling her er sammenhengen mellom hva som er optimal (ofte korteste) veg ut av bygningen – gitt startpunkt – og hvordan dette kan merkes / skiltes på en tydelig måte. Modellen skal anvendes på senteret på Nesttun.

Arbeidet vil skje i samarbeid med ansatte på Solli, og vil internt bli veiledet av Professor Stein W. Wallace og PhD-kandidat Andres Felipe Velez Correa. 

Planning and signage of evacuation from buildings

Solli District Psychiatric Center in Nesttun houses inpatient and outpatient departments for people over 18 with mental disorders. The hospital has a problem with patients not always finding their way back out of the building after finishing treatment and has started a project to improve signage to improve the flow of patients' movements inside the hospital. In this context, we will also optimize the evacuation plans for the building mass, as the signage may be based on a suboptimal evacuation plan.

Those who have to be evacuated and who move around the building are a mixture of the 150 employees, 19 inpatients and approximately 150 outpatients (per day) who come in for an hour every two weeks for treatment. These are patient groups with different types of behavior which may also be different from the behavior of patients in e.g. somatic departments, but who mostly have the same physical conditions as the general population.

This assignment is well suited for a BAN student. It involves modeling the evacuation of buildings using optimization. A particularly interesting connection here is the connection between what is the optimal (often shortest) way out of the building - given the starting point - and how this can be clearly marked / distinguished. The model will be used at the center at Nesttun.

The work will take place in collaboration with employees at Solli, and will be internally supervised by Professor Stein W. Wallace and PhD candidate Andres Felipe Velez Correa.

In 2019 before the sanitary emergency started, Norway received 5.88 million tourists representing 7,04 billion dollars and 1,7% of its GDP, reaching the highest levels in 2017. In this year, the tourism industry represented nearly 4,2% of Norwegian GDP and attracted around 170 billion NOK in total tourism consumption. These numbers show the potential of this industry for economic growth and depict some challenges. Particularly when we put the number of tourists in relation to the population of the country, it becomes clear the necessity to take a closer look at current policies and opportunities from point of view of operation research. 

For the City of Bergen, the cruise industry is especially important. Bergen receives the largest number of cruise tourists in the country, making of it one of the most visited cities in Scandinavia. 

It might be interesting for cruise companies to have touristic recommendations for their passengers, itineraries that provide the most benefits out the visit, and ensure the passengers will be back to the ship on time. But also, from the city hall perspective, it might be desirable to have a more homogenous distribution of the visitors across town in order to avoid crowds. Additionally, according to Bergen’s urbanization plan, there could be desirable areas of the city where it is more interesting to bring visitors and the money they spend on their trip, in the frame of urban development, social welfare, and environment. 

In order to assess the different locations, it is necessary to understand the city trends, socio-economic indicators, passenger preferences, and tourist offers, among others. Then use this information as support for an optimization model, allowing to suggest the best routes, both for the tourists and the City of Bergen. 

Main supervisor: PhD-candidate Andres Felipe Velez Correa.

In the oil and gas industry, helicopters are widely used for personnel and cargo transport between offshore platforms and heliports on the land. Therefore, the decision-making regarding the composition of the helicopter fleet and the allocation of this resource is vital for a stable operation of oil & gas exploration and extraction. Such tactical decision affects various aspects of an oil company, including contract utilization, carbon footprint, plan robustness and operating expenses.

However, the common practice in the industry is that the decision of fleet composition and allocation is still manually made based on demand forecast and individual’s experience. Such decision-making process cannot guarantee optimal solutions, is not scalable, and would likely lead to low resource utilization rate and high operating cost.

We are now seeing a clear trend in the oil and gas industry which is to apply automation in its various and complex decision-making process with the support of optimization. In terms of the helicopter fleet composition and allocation problem in this case, a decision support tool is expected to facilitate the decision of helicopter chattering and deployment with stochastic demand for the next planning period. Moreover, resource sharing, namely utilizing idle helicopter resources from other operators, is also a promising opportunity to increase the overall efficiency on an industry level and hence is becoming increasingly popular among different oil companies and helicopter operators.

With its trademark solution DaWinci as the industry standard in personnel logistics management, Quorum is the software supplier for many of the largest oil and gas companies in the world. Quorum Software Norway, as the market leader, is now cooperating with several major players in the oil and gas industry to address various new challenges with new software planning tools. This master project will take advantage of Quorum’s expertise in logistics management in oil and gas industry, and look at some of the following issues:

• Literature review on related problems and topics
• Mathematical formulation of the problem
• Study the uncertainty involved in this problem and methods to handle such stochasticity
• Study and develop necessary solution methods
• Analyze the numerical results based on a realistic problem instance from Quorum

Students choosing this project should expect to visit Quorum Software’s Bergen office to work alongside our optimization engineers for up to a week.

Collaborator: Quorum Software, contact person Xin Wang (xin.e.wang@quorumsoftware.com).

Supervisor: Yewen Gu.

The penetration of electric vehicles (EVs) in the Norwegian market is massive. I have dedicated part of my recent research to the optimization of charging schedules of EVs and to compare how the optimal patterns differ from the actual behaviour of EV owners. These are only examples from the broad range of topics in the research agenda on EVs nowadays. There is a lot of literature about it. I would be open to discuss your specific interests and to provide you with references that could set the basis for a potentially relevant master thesis on EVs.

Supervisor: Mario Guajardo.

Using real transaction data, estimate a volatility surface for freight options and assess whether it is different from other financial options markets w.r.t. implied volatility skew/smile.

Company: EEX.

Supervisor: Professor Roar Ådland

Using empirical case studies to quantify how more accurate short-term weather forecasting can improve chartering decisions for a ship operator.

Working with company Western Bulk.

Supervisor: Professor Roar Ådland

Using empirical hindcast and forecast data for precipitation in selected South American ports, to assess and predict the impact of rain events and intensity on the loading of weather sensitive cargoes such as paper, grain etc.

Work in co-operation with shipping companies Western Bulk and/or G2Ocean.

Supervisor: Professor Roar Ådland

Topic 1: Responsible investing in the shipping/offshore industry. How have (institutional) investors change their appetite in investing in the shipping/offshore industry, given public ESG concerns and initiatives from the industry?

Topic 2: Sustainability-Linked Debt issuance in shipping company – criteria, impact on transition to zero emission, asset investment and investor appetite.

Topic 3: Investment horizon in shipping. What determines the investment horizon? In the transition to zero emission, how shipping companies decide which asset class to invest? Short-term vs. long-term investment payback and performance analysis.

Topic 4: Optimal capital structure for shipping companies – determinants: ownership profile, prices, leverage, cycles and other factors.

Supervisor: Haiying Jia

Topic 1: Marine insurance risk aggregation. How to manage small-probability risk exposures? Geographically or event-linked exposures. Optimal risk transfer of low probability yet high impact events.

Topic 2: Marine risk assessment – using Machine learning or other methods. Analysis of Marine traffic data, claim locations and loss prevention applications.

Topic 3: Vessel utilization and its marine risks. Use innovative data sources to estimate vessel utilization, such as the emission data from MRV.

Topic 4: Coinsurance efficiency improvement. How to improve efficiency by system/data sharing? Blockchain?

Topic 5: INSURTECH Automated underwriting – system design view point, or technology viewpoint. How would a standard insurance portfolio perform is 100% can be automated.

Topic 6: Ownership structural of marine insurance companies. What are the challenges connected to the business model? What ownership structure is optimal?

Supervisor: Haiying Jia

Using fuel consumption and cost data from individual ships: How often should the company clean the hull of a ship to reduce fuel costs. Advanced – requires some knowledge of optimization, optimal stopping problems, semi-parametric regressions.

Company: SKS Tankers.

Supervisor: Professor Roar Ådland

Cargo owners and charterers are the key to reducing emissions in global seaborne transportation. How can we revise contracts such that all stakeholders have an incentive to perform efficiently?

Supervisor: Professor Roar Ådland

How can weather statistics and medium-term weather forecasts be used to improve pre-calculations of the voyage results for drybulk vessels? How accurate are the “rules-of-thumb” weather margins currently used in comparison?

Company: Golden Ocean.

Supervisor: Professor Roar Ådland

Using AIS data on ship positions, investigating how vessel speeds react to changes in fuel prices and spot freight rates in the short- and long run.
Requires familiarity with co-integration tests and econometrics.

Supervisor: Professor Roar Ådland

Using spatial AIS data for ship positions, open-source weather and macro data – can you develop a machine learning model to generate profitable trading signals? Requires knowledge of Python, implementation of machine learning models.

Supervisor: Roar Ådland

Using intraday bid/offers spreads – is it possible to use pattern recognition or technical analysis to daytrade forward freight agreements? Knowledge of Python and machine learning is useful. 

Supervisor: Professor Roar Ådland

Using: freight rates timeseries, optimal portfolio theory.

Company: Western Bulk.

Supervisor: Professor Roar Ådland

Using real transaction data, estimate a volatility surface for freight options and assess whether it is different from other financial options markets w.r.t. implied volatility skew/smile.
Company: EEX. 

Supervisor: Professor Roar Ådland

Using high-frequency bid-offer quotes, analyze changes in the bid-offer spread over time and how it correlates with trading volume, seasonality and freight market level.
Company: Zuma Labs/Braemar.

Supervisor: Roar Ådland

Large cruise ships can be hard to exit in emergency situations and face unique challenges regarding evacuation. The ship’s steel hull has so far precluded the use of wireless technologies, which implies that all communications must be cabled-based, not even cell-phones work in an emergency. Another challenge is that evacuation plans are static and cannot be adapted as the emergency unfolds, something important in this context as different factors, such as winds, waves and tilting of the boat, affect passenger behaviour and the evacuation itself. In an ongoing project we try to develop a practical and theoretically sound stochastic and dynamic evacuation model for a large passenger ships aided by innovative wireless technology.

The project is in cooperation with NTNU (that covers the technical parts with respect to engineering and ship design) while NHH cover the dynamic modeling of an evacuation. The new wireless technology comes from ScanReach at Sotra - https://www.scanreach.com/ - and they are closely involved in the project.

Possible theses would cover aspects (to be agreed upon between supervisor and student) of modeling the evacuation or solving resulting models. There are many challenges in the modeling so that the resulting model is fast, which is required in an emergency.

Supervisor: Stein W. Wallace

For e.g. breakbulk and chemical shipping companies it is challenging to find out which cargoes fit best together into a voyage such that all cargoes can be transported on voyages and ships travel the least possible distance. The aim of this topic is to create a model with typical restrictions and find a good weighing of the different aspects of the objective function. In cooperation with Dataloy Systems, you can use data to develop and test your model as well as discuss the underlying concepts.

Supervisor: Julio Cesar Goez

Using unique daily spatial data for vessel employment, analyze how regional freight rate changes are driven by supply and demand, and whether the specifications and operator of a ship matters for its attractiveness in the market.

Supervisor: Roar Ådland.

Urban population growth is driving an increase in the amount of freight that goes into and out of cities. That growth poses an increasing challenge to freight transportation in smaller compact cities with difficult topology, which is typical for most Norwegian cities and numerous cities abroad.

This transportation challenge is exacerbated by phenomena such as an increase in internet trade, the demand for fast delivery, and a reduction in the ownership of private cars in the city centre which could be used for shopping. The result is an increase in the total volume of freight, and more critically, in the total number of deliveries, normally managed by a large variety of transportation companies.

Unless planned for and regulated, a consequence might be increased traffic, with enhanced energy consumption, that competes for available space and may affect living conditions for a growing urban population.

This project will study small city logistics, with a focus on Bergen, to find the options available for the authorities, business models for a better city logistics setup, as well as mathematical modeling. Will be done in cooperation with the City of Bergen, Vestland County, Bergen Chamber of Commerce and Centre for Climate and Energy Transformation (CET) at The University of Bergen. The project can be qualitative as well as quantitative.

The project is funded by the Research Council of Norway, and we offer two project grants of NOK 25,000.

Possible supervisors: Stein W. Wallace, Julio C. Goez or Mario Guajardo.

Background

If you are a hunter from the Stone Age and one day you are facing an offer to replace you wooden stick with a brand new shotgun, will you still use your new weapon just as a harder stick made of steel to kill your prey, or use it in a better way? Similar challenges are now faced by the shipping companies due to the forthcoming technological evolution, namely the autonomous ship. Obviously, an autonomous ship with no crews on board can significantly reduce a shipping company’s crew cost.

However, just like the increased hardness of a shotgun in the hunter example, the reduction of crew cost might just be a tiny benefit of the autonomy of our ships. Besides the lower crew cost, what are the fundamental advantages of an autonomous vessel comparing to the conventional manned ship?

Greater potentials are expected by better utilizing these advantages with innovative ideas in the daily operation of the vessels, such as higher frequency of ferry in the night time, flexible hub location for waterway taxi and multi-functioned vessels with different remote control teams. The world’s first commercial autonomous vessel (Yara Birkeland) will be soon launched in Norway in the end of 2018. And it is a great opportunity for the students here to also take the leading position in the research of the autonomous vessel.

Contact: Mario Guajardo

The aim of emergency medical services (EMS) is to provide timely assistance to emergencies in order to save lives. Within this service, quality and capacity have sometimes deteriorated because staffing is not satisfactory and because the organization and directives are not clear. My interest is to work on the use of autonomous vessels to help ameliorate the burden that EMS staffing represents in the case of boat ambulances, and to improve the logistics planning of the system.

The aim is to analyze the use of autonomous vessels to improve response times and coverage. For example, by combining autonomous vessels with geographic information systems, one may use real time information of potential patients to improve the deployment of the resources. In particular my interest is to explore the following key research topic: designing algorithms with predictive capabilities that can be included in real time systems and capable of managing a continuous feed of data points coming from users’ cell phones and other sources.

Supervisor: Julio C. Goez.

Aim: find key drivers for decision-making process of repositioning empty vessels - current market conditions, sentiment - repeating patterns, etc.

Supervisor: Vít Procházka.

Dairy farmers with combined milk and beef production face complex decisions regarding optimum milk yield, slaughter age for bulls, calving age for heifers, disposal of farm land etc. The aim for this topic is to explore how operations research may help farmers improve their decision making process to increase their profitability. In this project the students will interact with TINE, Norway's largest producer, distributor and exporter of dairy products with 11,400 members (owners) and 9,000 cooperative farms.

Supervisors: Mario Guajardo and Julio C. Goez .

Car-sharing provides short-term vehicle access to a group of user members who share the use of a vehicle fleet owned by a car-sharing organization that maintains, manages, and insures the vehicles. An example of this model in Bergen is bildeleringer. Managing the fleet involves decisions such as the size of the fleet, how to position and reposition the vehicles, maintenance schedules, and pricing approaches. Strong background on analytics required

Supervisors: Julio C. Goez and Mario Guajadaro.

The providers of online applications usually need to find the deployment of minimum cost for running it in the cloud. For the deployment, the planner on the application side must consider renting resources from cloud providers. However, there is a service level constraint that must be satisfied to ensure the quality of the service.

Supervisor: Julio C. Goez.

Scheduling takes an important role in making shipping as efficient as possible. We want to evaluate the quality of a schedule in practice. As the amount of information changes from what is available during planning to what is available when the plan comes into action, this is a complex problem. The aim of this topic is to find a model to evaluate a plan with respect to how it was used in practice. This will allow us to evaluate if companies improved their scheduling over time. Using data provided by Dataloy Systems, we want to test the model and for example analyse if the implementation of a scheduling software had a positive impact on the schedules.

Supervisors: Julio Cesar Goez

Fishing in the antarctic is a profitable business that is aiming to professionalize its scheduling. Fishing boats are fishing and at the same time producing various fish products on board, increasing their stock of fish products on board. On regular intervals they need to meet a cargo vessel to transfer all their cargo onto the cargo vessel. This is to avoid the fishing boat having to go all the way to the coast and losing valuable fishing time. We want to find a model that fits this operation and can be extended to other storage scenarios (storage on the cargo ship, storage at a warehouse the cargo ship delivers to)

Supervisor: Julio Cesar Goez

For a ship that should visit several terminals in a port to discharge cargo and load cargo scheduling these terminal visits is not trivial. Each terminal has an individual waiting list, each cargo potentially has a deadline when it needs to be discharged or loaded and additionally the ship is not allowed to be overloaded at any point in time. We are interested in a model to evaluate the quality of different solutions.

Supervisor: Julio Cesar Goez