Your function

Climate change is rapidly increasing the frequency and severity of extreme weather events. The Netherlands, where 26% of the territory lies below sea level, is particularly vulnerable to flooding and other climate-related hazards. Effective a priori evacuation plans are known to reduce loss of life, yet uncertainty surrounding both the spatial development and temporal progression of disasters often renders theoretically optimal evacuation decisions unviable in practice. Designing evacuation strategies that remain efficient, feasible and resilient when critical infrastructure is threatened by large-scale disruptions therefore remains a major challenge in Operations Research.

The RESCUE project develops new multi-stage optimization models for pre-disaster evacuation decisions on critical road and shelter infrastructure subject to failures. Combining robust optimization, stochastic programming and copula theory, the project assesses the resilience of both self-evacuation and shelter-in-place strategies. For this purpose, the project draws on concepts from network flow problems and assignment problems. Models are validated using hydrodynamic simulations of Dutch flash flood scenarios. 

Your duties
RESCUE (The Resilience of Evacuation Strategies on Compromised and Unreliable Evacuation infrastructure) is a project from the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam (VU), funded by the NWO Open Competition - Domain Science. The PhD candidate will be employed at the Department of Operations Analytics and supervised by Dr. Pascal Wissink (PI), in close collaboration with Dr. Markus Leitner, Prof. David Wozabal and Prof. Bas Kolen (University of Amsterdam).

Your duties include:

Your profile

As a university, we strive for equal opportunities for all, recognising that diversity takes many forms. We believe that diversity in all its complexity is invaluable for the quality of our teaching, research and service. We are always looking for talent with diverse backgrounds and experiences. This also means that we are committed to creating an inclusive community so that we can use diversity as an asset.

We realise that each individual brings a unique set of skills, expertise and mindset. Therefore we are happy to invite anyone who recognises themselves in the profile to apply.

What do we offer?

A challenging position in a socially engaged organisation. At VU Amsterdam, you contribute to education, research and service for a better world. And that is valuable. So in return for your efforts, we offer you:

We also offer you attractive fringe benefits and arrangements. Some examples: