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PSM Course Descriptions

INDE 7397 Economics of Disaster

INDE 6397 Environmental Health and Safety

INDE 7397 Evacuation Planning and Management

INDE 7397 Hazardous Materials Management

INDE 7397 Risk Management and Hazardous Mitigation

INDE 7397 Database Systems and Information Management

INDE 7397 Logistics and Transportation

INDE 6332 Engineering Project Management

INDE 7397 Decision Making for Public Safety

INDE 7397 Computer and Information Security

INDE 7397 Operations Control in PSM

 

INDE 7397 Economics of Disaster

The course is intended to provide students with advanced tools necessary to evaluate, measure,and compare contributions of economic principles to disaster research, mitigation, and planning. The course also demonstrates how mathematical techniques, both deterministic and probabilistic, can be employed by decision makers in developing more objective and sound engineering decisions.

Upon completion of this course, students should be able to understand disaster modeling, risk and uncertainty, cost-benefit analysis for natural disaster management. Other outcomes of the course include an in-depth knowledge of definition of terms and current methodologies and their limitations. Students will also be able to effectively utilize cost comparison concepts to determine the economic desirability of any remediation models.

INDE 6397 Environmental Health and Safety

This course provides an overview of the principles environmental safety & health. The course handles topics such as principles and concepts of environmental health and safety including essential information related to the recognition, evaluation, and control of occupational and environmental hazards. In Environmental hazards, the main focus is on air, water, and solid waste, pollution, and human effects on the environment, such as Global Warming, etc. In
Occupational topics, the main focus is on how to recognize the need for effective safety programs, PPE, ergonomics, Fires, lab safety, etc. The course also includes information related to public safety, the community, businesses, labs, government, education/research, or other work environments.

INDE 7397 Evacuation Planning and Management

This course aims to provide students with the essential tools for planning and managing evacuation in the face of natural or man-made disasters. The course will begin with the introduction of important concepts related to evacuation planning such as hazard assessment, alert procedures and warnings, and current experience, philosophy and practice in evacuation planning issues. Next, we will discuss evacuation behavioral findings and demonstrate a path analysis of evacuation behavior. The course will then focus on disaster response and preparedness by addressing disaster response planning issues, resource management, triage and communication issues in disaster. Planning for post disaster recovery will also be discussed.

This course will also include discussions of real-life case studies such as hurricane Katrina (2005), New England flooding (2006), California wild fires (2007), hurricane Ike (2008), Haiti earthquake (2010), Japanese tsunami (2011), and emergency planning around nuclear power plants.

Upon completion of this course, students should be able to:

  • Explain the significance of context and risk based evacuation planning
  • Explain the significance of disaster response and recovery planning
  • Identify and test assumptions that relate to assets and capabilities required to implement a plan
  • Describe the key issues requiring consideration at the local and global strategic levels
  • Describe the key implementation issues for effective evacuation and shelter operations.
  • Explain the significance of internal and external communications in evacuation planning.

INDE 7397 Hazardous Materials Management

The course begins with an extended discussion of the nature and characteristics of hazardous materials. The intent here is to enable students to recognize, identify and understand the materials that they might be confronted with in a hazardous material incident. The course then focuses on the analysis of hazardous materials incidents – the factors, influencing the behavior of materials in incidents and dispersion patterns of different materials. Students are provided with an analytical framework called events analysis which facilitates the assessment of the nature, scope and likely outcome of an incident. Finally, the course addresses the particular public safety problems associated with transportation of hazardous materials.

Upon completion of the course, students should be able to:

  • Identify a variety of hazardous materials
  • Classify various hazardous materials
  • Describe the factors influencing the behavior of selected hazardous materials
  • Describe the dispersion patterns of selected hazardous materials
  • Utilize events analysis as a framework for assessing various hazardous materials incidents
  • Identify the specific problems associated with transportation of hazardous materials
  • Identify the resources available for public safety personnel in planning for and responding to hazardous materials incidents.

INDE 7397 Risk Management and Hazardous Mitigation

The course is intended to introduce the concepts and applications related to risk management such as risk identification, risk analysis, risk evaluation and risk treatment. Providing the information about hazards and disaster as well as the history and evolution of hazard mitigation, the course teaches how to develop a disaster mitigation plan.

INDE 7397 Database Systems and Information Management

This course provides an introduction to database systems and information management. The course will focus on concepts and applications related to database systems and information management such as GIS and GPS tools, direct and remote sensing, emergency management decision support systems. The course will also cover related topics such as internet, network and communication systems, warning systems, problems and trends in emergency management technology. In addition, the course will provide the knowledge of computer programming using Java language. Application of this language to designing and programming a “mobile situation awareness” case is also discussed.

INDE 7397 Logistics and Transportation

This course seeks to familiarize graduate students with problems in the design and control of modern logistics systems, and quantitative methods for modeling, analyzing and developing solutions to these problems. Topics to be covered include: 1) facility location planning, 2) long-haul transportation management, 3) short-haul transportation management. The objectives of this course are:

  1. To develop a deeper understanding of logistics problems, including design and operational problems
  2. To develop skills in the use of the operations research/management science tools to address logistics problems
  3. To become familiar with some of the complicated nature of practical logistics problems, and to learn how these problems can be attacked with industrial engineering tools

INDE 6332 Engineering Project Management

The topics that this course covers include strategic management and project selection, project organization, planning, scheduling and control of engineering projects, network models (CPM and PERT), conflict and negotiation, budgeting and cost estimation, resource allocation, time-cost trade-offs, monitoring and information systems, project auditing and termination.

INDE 7397 Decision Making for Public Safety

The objective of decision analysis is to help a decision maker think hard about the specific problem at hand, including the overall structure of the problem as well as her or his preferences and beliefs. The purpose of studying decision analysis techniques is to be able to represent real-world problems using models that can be analyzed to gain insight and understanding. Using this insight and understanding, best decisions can be made.

This course covers modern decision analysis techniques as applied to public safety operations. The first part of the course focuses on modeling decisions. The course will start with an introduction to decision analysis. We will follow with a discussion of elements of decision problems. Next, we will cover how to structure decisions and make choices by using influence diagrams and decision trees. We will also discuss sensitivity analysis as it relates to the overall decision making strategy, and introduce a variety of graphical sensitivity analysis techniques. The second part of the course deals with modeling uncertainty. We will first review probability basics and then discuss subjective probability, probability models and value of information. Finally, in the last part of the course, we will discuss modeling preferences, in particular, risk attitudes and utility theory.

INDE 7397 Computer and Information Security

This course provides an introduction to computer and information security principles. The focus of the course is to teach students how to establish and maintain information security projects in organizations. These issues are addressed in administrative, operational and technical contexts. The topics include risk management, risk assessment, security policy, security technology, physical security, etc.

Upon completing the course, students should be able to:

  • Understand why information systems security is critical in today’s organizations
  • Identify key legislative and policy documents that provide guidance in developing an information system security project for an organization
  • Analyze and develop a security plan of risk assessment
  • Research and report on the key technologies in achieving information security
  • Identify and discuss the ethical and societal issues related to information security.

INDE 7397 Operations Control in Public Safety Management

The objective of this course is to discuss how to apply operations management concepts, principles and techniques to public safety management. The first part of the course involves a discussion of the four phases of emergency management: preparedness, mitigation, response and recovery. These four phases were introduced in the early 80s to better structure the way in which communities in the United States respond to disasters. In the second part of the class, we will discuss the use of project management, inventory management, supply chain management, logistics and transportation in disaster preparedness, mitigation, response and recovery.