Congratulations to Brenda Bustillos!!
The Society of Mexican American Engineers and Scientists, Inc. (MAES) recently culminated the celebration of its 30th anniversary at its 2004 International Symposium and Career Fair in Austin, Texas.
Scholarships totaling $74,600 were awarded to college students through MAES’ Scholarship Program and the Technical Competitions Program. Several students of the University of Texas at El Paso received scholarships. One of these exceptional recipients is the civil engineering students, Brenda Bustillos, who received a general scholarship in the amount of $1,000 in recognition of her academic achievements and leadership.
Gabriel Esparza won the Best Undergraduate Student Paper Award
Gabriel Esparza (CE undergraduate) won the Best Undergraduate Student Paper Award and $1,500 scholarship by the ITEA.
He has presented his paper entitled ”Developing Large-Scale Evacuation Capabilities in Response to Airborne Hazmat Release” at the 2003 ITEA Modeling and Simulation Workshop in Las Cruces, NM, December 8-11, 2003. The faculty advisor of this paper is Dr. Yi-Chang Chiu
Abstract: Large-scale evacuation is called for when a natural (such as hurricane) or man-made (such as hazmat release or even dirty bomb) extreme event strikes a populated area so that the population is exposed to immediate or foreseeable life-threatening danger. Evacuating a large population is an extremely complicated and difficult task, which primarily relies on efficient utilization of intermodal transportation systems, and effective evacuee evacuation schemes. In an unexpected extreme event scenario, evacuating a large population could be devastating. Lacking proper coordination among evacuees in choosing evacuation times and routes, evacuees often get stuck in the roadway gridlocks for an excessive period of time. This could lead to significant life and property loss that would have been otherwise saved.
This paper presents a research that is aimed at developing an emergency evacuation modeling capability, which entails a careful integration of an optimal evacuation time and route choice model, as well as a traffic simulation model. The optimal evacuation time and route choice model is a non-linear mathematical programming model. The traffic simulation model is a meso-scopic simulation model that simulates all the vehicles in the network in a computational efficient manner. The El Paso area network has been constructed as a test bed for the case study in which a toxic airborne hazmat release incident occurs in the morning peak hours; thus calls for a large-scale city wide evacuation. Experiment results conclude that the proposed methodology provide a critical operational planning capability for large-scale emergency evacuation management. Significant insights
NSF Grant
The Center of Transportation Infrastructure Systems, a collaborating research institution fully supported by faculty of the Department of Civil Engineering at UTEP recently received a three-year, $440K research grant from US National Science Foundation starting October 1, 2003. This research project, titled “Integrated Physical-Social-Economic System Dynamics Modeling for Managing Extreme Events Induced Risk on the U.S.-Mexico Border Crossing Infrastructure” is a multidisciplinary evaluation of natural and terrorist threats to the U.S.-Mexico border crossing infrastructure. This research initiates the first comprehensive scientific investigation of the interrelated engineering infrastructure, social, and economic systems on the U.S.-Mexico border. An integrated simulation and decision model will be developed to assess the impact of extreme events on transportation system congestion, border crossing delays, depth of inspections at the Port of Entry, number of border crossers, and the regional economy. This model will help to secure the U.S.-Mexico border by providing a means of assessing the impact of homeland security policy decisions aimed at reducing the vulnerability of the border infrastructure.
The investigators of this project include Drs. Soheil Nazarian (PI, Civil), Yi-Chang Chiu (Co-PI, Civil), Patrick Gurian (Co-PI, Civil), Cesar Carrasco (Co-PI, Civil), and Joseph Heyman (Co-PI, Sociology). The collaborating faculty also includes Drs. Carlos Ferregut (Civil) and Thomas Fullerton (Economics and Finance), Leticia Fernandez (Sociology), and Cheryl Howard (Sociology.) The project will provide support for graduate student researchers in all three participating departments, including the recently approved PhD program in Infrastructure Systems in Civil Engineering.
