Emergency evacuation planning in natural disasters under diverse population and fleet characteristics

Abstract

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to formulate and solve a new emergency evacuation planning problem. This problem addresses the needs of both able and disabled persons who are evacuated from multiple pick-up locations and transported using a heterogeneous fleet of vehicles. Design/methodology/approach The problem is formulated using a mixed integer linear programming model and solved using a heuristic algorithm. The authors analyze the selected heuristic with respect to key parameters and use it to address theoretical and practical case studies. Findings Evacuating people with disabilities has a significant impact on total evacuation time, due to increased loading/unloading times. Additionally, increasing the number of large capacity vehicles adapted to transport individuals with disabilities benefits total evacuation time. Research limitations/implications The mathematical model is of high complexity and it is not possible to obtain exact solutions in reasonable computational times. The efficiency of the heuristic has not been analyzed with respect to optimality. Practical implications Solving the problem by a heuristic provides a fast solution, a requirement in emergency evacuation cases, especially when the state of the theater of the emergency changes dynamically. The parametric analysis of the heuristic provides valuable insights in improving an emergency evacuation system. Social implications Efficient population evacuation studied in this work may save lives. This is especially critical for disabled evacuees, the evacuation of whom requires longer operational times. Originality/value The authors consider a population that comprises able and disabled individuals, the latter with varying degrees of disability. The authors also consider a heterogeneous fleet of vehicles, which perform multiple trips during the evacuation process.

Lean readiness assessment model – a tool for Humanitarian Organizations' social and economic sustainability

“…Logistics and supply chain management are both crucial to supporting the timely response of an HO to a disaster (Chong et al, 2019). By definition the disaster is likely to occur suddenly, without warning, with devastating consequences affecting a wide area and potentially a large number of victims (Cozzolino, 2012;Baou et al, 2018). HLSCM is a distinctive unit of any HO, and the success or failure of any humanitarian operation is highly dependent on this unit (Cozzolino, 2012).…”

Integrating Human Behavior and Safety Measure into Evacuation Route Planning in a Volcanic Crisis

“…They concluded that the minimization of travel time for an evacuation plan should not be the only objective for a planner, especially when the capacity and street traffic play critical variables in the problem. Baou et al [12] proposed a model to consider the disabled population in the evacuation plan. They found that evacuating people with disabilities has a significant impact on total evacuation time.…”

Vehicle Routing Optimisation in Humanitarian Operations: A Survey on Modelling and Optimisation Approaches

“…In [126], the problem of evacuating evacuees with disabilities is addressed based on their categories by a fleet of heterogeneous vehicles. Here, the vehicle ranged from ambulances, vehicles that are capable of carrying only normal evacuees, as well as vehicles for carrying evacuees with wheelchairs.…”

“…From these models, various interesting and complex problems are addressed. As a general trend, it could be seen that most work addressed split delivery, such as in [34,42,46,47,[49][50][51]61,71,73,75,76,78,81,83,85,87,94,96,102,116,123,128,158] and multi-trip VRP that can be seen in [31,47,50,61,76,88,90,94,97,98,124,126,129], ref. [134,149,159] normally stressed on the problem of vehicle limitations such as the numbers of vehicle or the fuel limitation.…”

“…Ref. [112] addresses the flow of debris, which causes harm during evacuation, while [126,131] focuses on evacuating victims with disability. On the other hand, ref.…”