Operations research Tools

for solving environmental security problems

Eugene LEVNER

Holon Institute of Technology

Holon, 58102, ISRAEL

 

Abstract

 

In this talk, I consider two problems related to coordinating and mitigating ecological risks in large-scale exploited ecosystems. The first problem relates to the risk management of trans-boundary water resources. For its formal description, I propose a combination of two (relatively new) management concepts, the environmental supply chain and the house-of-risk, which allows one to reformulate the ecological management problem in Operations Research terms. The problem of the integrated risk assessment is reformulated as the Facility Location Problem and its special case, the multiple-choice knapsack problem.

 

The second problem is the general problem of environmental risk assessment. I propose to use a portfolio selection approach (Harry Markovitz, 1952), designed for managing financial risks, for treating environmental risks. I extend the basic Markovitz model in two aspects. First, I consider each objective function (i.e., the return and risks) as a vector of several functions corresponding to separate technical, economic, social and other dimensions of risk. Second, I consider a variable portfolio x as a matrix rather than as a vector of variable assets. The proposed model is more complicated, and, computationally, this model is less tractable than the classical Markowitz model. However, the proposed model allows one to use powerful tools for financial risk analysis. Particularly, multi-criteria mathematical programming models and methods can be used for measuring and optimizing the environmental risks.