The refugee camp management: a general framework and clean water network design
Author(s)
Advisor
Kara, Bahar Y.Date
2017-01Publisher
Bilkent University
Language
English
Type
ThesisItem Usage Stats
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Abstract
Motivated by the increasing need to provide support to refugees, which remains
as a pressing issue in the agenda of many countries, we consider the refugee camp
management problem. It is of utmost importance that asylum-providing countries
co-operate with the Non-Governmental Organizations (NGOs) while managing
the process and use the resources e ciently and e ectively. The Refugee crisis
is one of the challenges of today's world mainly due to the di culties such as
geographical discrepancies and unknown duration of refugee camps.
In the rst part of the thesis (Chapter 2), we consider the refugee camp management
process with an Operations Research (OR) perspective and provide a
framework. In the proposed framework, the overall refugee camp management
problem is rst categorized into two main phases: the establishment phase, which
consists of one-time decisions such as infrastructure design; and the administration
phase, which focuses on routine decisions that are taken on a periodic basis
like aid distribution. We then detail each phase via sub categories and link each
decision made in these sub categories with an appropriate decision problem from
the OR literature. The proposed framework is aimed to be general enough to
cover the problems that might arise in di erent geographies.
In the second part of the thesis, the water network design problem encountered
in establishment phase of refugee camps is considered. We propose single
and bi-objective models that determine the locations of water well and water distribution
units (WDUs), and design the general network structure (transmission
pipes). As objective functions; total cost as a function of pipe length and total
walking distance of refugees to the closest water source are utilized. The minimal requirements de ned by various NGOs are incorporated into the models. One of
them is ensuring that the distance between a tent and its closest WDU should
be below a certain threshold, which is imposed on the models as a covering constraint.
The data set acquired from Gaziantep refugee camp in Turkey is utilized
when solving the models.
We solve the single objective models using CPLEX. While solving bi-objective
models, the epsilon constraint approach is applied in order to nd the optimal
Pareto frontier. In our computational experiments, we observed that for smaller
threshold values, solution times increase in an exponential manner. Thus, we
modify the non-dominated sorting genetic algorithm (NSGA-II) and use it to
solve such problems. The quality of the Pareto solutions acquired by NSGA-II
and the epsilon constraint method are assessed via performance measures de ned
in the literature.