Evacuation and rescue traffic optimization with different rescue entrance opening plans

Abstract

In the aim of reducing the impacts of urgent disasters on people’s life, health and property jointly, rescue vehicles need to be sent to the risk zones and the affected population should be evacuated from the risk zones. The rescue traffic and the evacuation traffic interact with each other and have conflict directions. And the conflicts are dynamic with the changes of rescue routes if adopting different rescue entrance opening plans. The rescue traffic has priority and thus it is necessary to study the impacts of rescue traffic on the evacuation traffic organization. In this paper, a two-staged optimization method for evacuation and rescue traffic organization is proposed. For the rescue traffic, different rescue entrance opening plans are considered. Numerical studies are carried out on an empirical network. And the proposed method is compared with two existing shortest-path-based rescue traffic organization methods. The results show that the rescue traffic with different rescue entrances opening plans affect the evacuation traffic organization dynamically, and the evacuation effectiveness and the rescue effectiveness can be balanced by adjusting the number of open rescue entrances.