Earthquake response in mega cities: A mathematical model for the selection of relief shelters in the Valley of Mexico and a qualitative assessment for Istanbul, Turkey

Abstract

Natural disasters represent challenging situations globally, with earthquakes being some of the most devastating type of disasters. The difficulties to cope with them arise in contexts like mega cities, large urban agglomerations where the population dynamics make seismic disaster more struggling. In this sense, the use of humanitarian logistics techniques is an effective way to provide solutions in these contexts. In this thesis, a mathematical model is developed and used to support the selection of relief shelters from a set of potential locations. The model aims to minimize both the distances between the affected areas and the chosen shelter locations, as well as the costs of adapting the selected locations into relief shelters. The model was applied to different instances, from a small controlled one to understand and validate the way the model works, to scenarios with dimensions similar to (and even larger than) mega cities. The application of the model considered both real information gathered from a mega city in a seismic region (the Metropolitan Area of the Valley of Mexico; formed by Mexico City and several municipalities in the surrounding States of Mexico and Hidalgo), and simulated data based on the real one to face the difficulties to obtain all the required real data. Once the results were obtained for every model, a graphical tool was used to visualize them. That tool is ©QGIS, an open source Geographic Information System that allows to create maps using the resulting data from the application of the models. This visualization of results permits to identify if the results seem practical and reasonable, and represent a powerful tool to sustain the decision making after an earthquake. Finally, this work also contains a qualitative assessment of the circumstances of a different mega city with seismic danger: Istanbul, focused on a brief summary of the Istanbul Seismic Risk Mitigation and Emergency Preparedness Project (ISMEP); a document related to the way of coping with earthquakes in a different mega city located in a very seismic region.