A disaster evacuation network model for transporting multiple priority evacuees

Abstract

There is an increasing number of natural disasters occurring worldwide, particularly in populated areas. These events affect a large number of people, causing injuries and fatalities. Providing rapid medical treatment is of utmost importance in such circumstances. The problem of transporting patients to medical facilities has been studied to only a small extent. One of the challenges is to find a strategy that can simultaneously maximize the number of survivors and minimize the total evacuation cost under a given set of resource and geographic constraints. We propose a mathematical optimization model called Triage–Assignment–Transportation (TAT) model that decides on the tactical routing assignment of several classes of evacuation vehicles between staging areas and shelters in the nearby area. The model takes into account the level of injury to the evacuees, the capacities of vehicles, and available resources at each shelter. TAT is a mixed-integer linear programming and minimum-cost flow model. Comprehensive computational experiments are performed to examine the applicability of the TAT model. TAT can offer valuable insights for decision-makers about the number of staging areas, evacuation vehicles, and medical resources that are required to complete a large-scale evacuation based on the estimated number of evacuees.