THE SOCIAL AND PSYCHOLOGICAL IMPACT OF RADIOLOGICAL TERRORISM

The July 2005 terrorist attacks in London demonstrated the resilience of Western society in the face of low-level conventional terrorism. But the psychological damage from the London bombings would likely pale next to the severe, unpredictable, long-lasting effects of a radiological attack. One unique hazard of radiation exposure beyond the obvious physiological effects is that it is colorless, odorless, and tasteless, making it difficult for ordinary citizens to evaluate, quantify, and rationally understand the dangers confronting them. Radiological weapons stand out among the tools available to terrorists for their capacity to inflict far-reaching psychological damage to civilian populaces well beyond the immediate victims. A possible solution to mitigate the psychological consequences is to build a “resilience culture,” an interlocking set of beliefs, attitudes, approaches, and behaviors that help people fare better in any disaster or extraordinary circumstance. The “all-hazards approach,” which emphasizes the identifiable similarities among the “disaster triad”—that is, natural, accidentally man-made, and intentionally man-made disasters—extends to acts of terrorism and could help demystify the fears associated with radiological terrorist weapons.     

Probabilistic a priori routing-location problems

In many routing-location models customers located at nodes of a network generate calls for service with known probabilities. The customers that request service in a particular day are served by a single server that performs a service tour visiting these customers. The order of providing service to customers for each potential list of calls is uniquely defined by some a priori fixed basic sequence of all the customers (a priori tour). The problems addressed in this article are to find an optimal home location or an optimal basic sequence for the server so as to minimize the expectation of a criterion. The following criteria are considered: the total waiting time of all the customers, the total length of the tour, the maximal waiting time of a customer, the average traveled length per customer, and the average waiting time per customer. We present polynomial-time algorithms for the location problems. For the routing problems we present lower bounds that can be calculated efficiently (in polynomial time) and used in a branch-and-bound scheme. © 1994 John Wiley & Sons, Inc.     

Project scheduling under competition

We introduce and investigate the problem of scheduling activities of a project by a firm that competes with another firm (the competitor) that has to perform the same project. The profit that the firm gets from each activity depends on whether the firm finishes the activity before or after its competitor. The objective is to maximize the guaranteed (worst‐case) profit. We assume that both the firm and the competitor can perform only one activity at a time. We perform a detailed complexity analysis of the problem, and consider problems with and without precedence constraints, with and without delay of the competitor, with general and equal processing times of activities. For polynomially solvable cases (which include, for example, all the considered problems without delay of the competitor), we present easily implementable and intuitive rules that allow us to obtain optimal schedules in linear or almost linear time. For some NP‐hard cases, we present pseudopolynomial algorithms and fast heuristics with worst‐case approximation guarantees. © 2005 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Naval Research Logistics, 2005.