Performance and Cost of Cross-County Collaboration in Special Needs Shelter (SpNS) Planning

Planning for disasters in advance can significantly reduce their impact on the public; however, it becomes very challenging when dealing with special needs populations and their assignment to shelters. Older populations may also require such special attention, although they may or may not be listed in the registries, since their health conditions may deteriorate rapidly in the aftermath of a disaster. A previous study has shown the benefits of possible cross-county collaboration while assigning older populations to the special needs shelters (SpNS) using a p-Median model. This type of approach will not only ease the solution with pooling limited shelter capacities of counties, but will also provide more options to public and emergency agencies. Such a collaboration, however, can also induce extra costs on certain groups of the population since the optimization models focus on the minimization of total costs for the entire affected area rather than individual groups of population. As such, this study focuses on developing performance measures needed to monitor the success and cost of cross-county collaboration in SpNS planning through a GIS-based optimization methodology, with a case study of five counties in the Panhandle region of Florida. Results indicate that the scale and cost of collaboration between counties can provide interesting insight to agencies on the details of a more realistic cross-county collaboration planning.

  • Supplemental Notes:
    • This paper was sponsored by TRB committee ABR20 Standing Committee on the Logistics of Disaster Response and Business Continuity.
  • Authors:
  • Conference:
  • Date: 2018

Language

  • English

Media Info

  • Media Type: Digital/other
  • Features: Figures; Maps; References; Tables;
  • Pagination: 7p

Subject/Index Terms

Filing Info

  • Accession Number: 01658693
  • Record Type: Publication
  • Report/Paper Numbers: 18-02515
  • Files: TRIS, TRB, ATRI
  • Created Date: Jan 31 2018 5:00PM