Abstract
Emergency evacuation aims to transport people from dangerous places to safe shelters as quickly as possible. Police play an important role in the evacuation process, as they can handle traffic accidents immediately and help people move smoothly on roads. This paper investigates an evacuation routing problem that involves police resource allocation. We propose a novel k-th-shortest-path-based technique that uses explicit congestion control to optimize evacuation routing and police resource allocation. A nonlinear mixed-integer programming model is presented to formulate the problem. The model’s objective is to minimize the overall evacuation clearance time. Two algorithms are given to solve the problem. The first one linearizes the original model and solves the linearized problem with CPLEX. The second one is a heuristic algorithm that uses a police resource utilization efficiency index to directly solve the original model. This police resource utilization efficiency index significantly aids in the evaluation of road links from an evacuation throughput perspective. The proposed algorithms are tested with a number of examples based on real data from cities of different sizes. The computational results show that the police resource utilization efficiency index is very helpful in finding near-optimal solutions. Additionally, comparing the performance of the heuristic algorithm and the linearization method by using randomly generated examples indicates that the efficiency of the heuristic algorithm is superior.
Highlights
Emergency evacuation has recently received extra attention due to an increase in both manmade and natural emergency events
The second one is a heuristic method based on the police resource utilization efficiency index of road links
We present a nonlinear mixed-integer programming (NMIP) model to describe the integrated police resources allocation and emergency evacuation routing problem
Summary
Emergency evacuation has recently received extra attention due to an increase in both manmade and natural emergency events. The International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies (IFRC) reports that 7,184 disasters occurred around the world during the first decade of the 21th century and that those disasters accounted for the deaths of more than 1 million people. These events affected approximately 2.55 billion people and incurred $986. Emergency Evacuation Routing and Police Resource Allocation billion in economic losses [1].The Sandia National Laboratory for the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) states that an evacuation of greater than 1000 people happens approximately every 14–21 days [2]. Compared to common location and routing operations, emergency evacuation presents some unique challenges:
Sign-in/Register to view highlights & summary Sign-in/Register to access full text options 
Talk to us
Join us for a 30 min session where you can share your feedback and ask us any queries you have
Schedule a call
