Reliability analysis for disaster waste management systems

Abstract

The management of disaster waste is one of the most critical tasks associated with recovery after a disaster. Having a general idea of the required capacity, cost and target clean-up time while considering the uncertainties involved in the system before the detailed plan of a disaster waste clean-up system is significant. Reliability analysis is a method to judge the performance of a system and deal with uncertainties in the system. Evaluating the reliability of the system, which can indicate the possibility to complete the clean-up within the target time and cost, and optimising the system to maximise the reliability to provide information to decision-makers regarding the capacity, cost and time required to finish the clean-up is the purpose of this paper. A mathematical model is developed applying the First Order Reliability Method (FORM) to address the problem. Additionally, a non-linear optimisation model is developed to improve the reliability of the disaster waste clean-up system with consideration of the total cost and clean-up time constraints, and solved using a Genetic Algorithm. The proposed models are implemented to solve a case study in Queensland, Australia. It is shown that the models have the capability of maximising the reliability and minimising the total clean-up costs by optimising the arrangement of vehicles during the clean-up process.

Keywords: Disaster waste clean-up; First-Order Reliability Method (FORM); Genetic Algorithms (GA); Optimisation; Reliability index.