The project was sponsored by the Chemical Security Analysis Center. The students’ goal was to design a mathematical model to assess and manage the risk to the population involved in transporting toxic chemicals. The student team adapted a minimum cost network flow model with randomized cost coefficients. The results have been presented by the students in talks at professional meetings in addition to formal presentations to the sponsors of the project. The study was published in the Journal of Transportation Security.
I led several project for the Applied Mathematics Laboratory at the Department of Mathematics. The Laboratory recruits a team of undergraduate students to work, under the direction of faculty members, on an applied problem provided by the sponsor of the project.
The sponsors included organizations such as the National Institute of Justice, Baltimore City Fire Department, Baltimore County Department of Environmental Protection and Resource Management, and Science Applications International Corporation. The complete list (it is rather long: the AML had been running for more than 30 years!) is at the AML website.
One of the projects I directed was for the Chemical Security Analysis Center established by the Department of Homeland Security. The goal of the project was to design a model to estimate road transport of industrial chlorine in the US from the available storage data.
In the course of the project, the students gave four formal end-of-semester presentations to the sponsors; two talks at the GMU Atmospheric Modeling Conference and a talk at the MAA Mathfest in 2010. We published the results of the study in the following paper:
- Alexei Kolesnikov, Angel Kumchev, Dennis Howell, Patrick OÂ’Neill and Matthew Tiger, Estimation of the commodity flow of chlorine from storage data, Journal of Transportation Security. Volume 5 (Number 1, 2012), pp. 51–68.
More recent projects I directed benefitted the Baltimore Humane Society and Disability Rights Maryland.