Strategic evacuation planning with pedestrian guidance and bus routing: a mixed integer programming model and heuristic solution

Abstract

Summary This paper presents a mathematical model to plan emergencies in a densely populated urban zone where a certain numbers of pedestrians depend on transit for evacuation. The proposed model features an integrated operational framework, which simultaneously guides evacuees through urban streets and crosswalks (referred to as “the pedestrian network”) to designated pickup points (e.g., bus stops), and routes a fleet of buses at different depots to those pick‐up points and transports evacuees to their destinations or safe places. In this level, the buses are routed through the so‐called “vehicular network.” An integrated mixed integer linear program that can effectively take into account the interactions between the aforementioned two networks is formulated to find the maximal evacuation efficiency in two networks. Because the large instances of the proposed model are mathematically difficult to solve to optimality, a two‐stage heuristic is developed to solve larger instances of the model. Results from hundreds of numerical examples analysis indicate that proposed heuristic works well in providing (near) optimal or feasibly good solutions for medium‐scale to large‐scale instances that may arise in real transit‐based evacuation situations in a much shorter amount of computational time compared with cplex (can find optimal/feasible solutions for only five instances within 3 hours of running). Copyright © 2016 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Capacity-Constrained Contraflow Adaption for Lane Reconfiguration in Evacuation Planning

“…Ikeda and Inoue proposed a Multi-Objective Genetic Algorithm (MOGA) to evaluate evacuation routes by considering route distance and evacuation time to select optimal evacuation routes [22]. Heydar et al divided the transportation network into pedestrian network and vehicular network, where pedestrians were assigned the shortest routes to the safe areas in pedestrian network and vehicles transferred evacuees to designated shelters in vehicular network [23]. These prescriptive methods have demonstrated the feasibility of calculating evacuation strategies for traffic evacuation.…”

“…Various methods, such as simulation [13][14][15], classification network [23], and mathematical modeling [1,2], are used to formulate the evacuation situations. In this paper, the mathematical graph is used to describe the traffic evacuation situations [1,2,5,6,17].…”

Pedestrian–bus Route and Pickup Location Planning for Emergency Evacuation

“…Especially, some level of bus priorities (bus lane, special bus signal) in evacuation operation is of benefit to enhance the reliability of evacuation routes. The recent occurrences of emergency events due to extreme weathers and terrorist attacks threatening urban communities with high population densities have served as the motivation to study and develop a novel model of strategic planning of pedestrian-bus evacuation for an evacuation operation of an urban community when information regarding the threats is somewhat available in advance (Heydar et al 2016).…”

“…Furthermore, this study attempts to optimize evacuation duration time under the constraint of bus quantity. Most closely related to this topic, the work of Heydar et al (2016) and Zhang, Chang (2014) determined how the transit-dependent people should be assigned to pickup nodes and identified vehicle routes during the evacuation process, but they assumed that there are enough buses or vehicles to transit the assembled evacuees.…”

Dynamic Route Choice Prediction Model Based on Connected Vehicle Guidance Characteristics

“…Existing route guidance research mainly focuses on route guidance algorithms [16,17,[27][28][29], guidance strategy [30][31][32], and system design [33] using traditional data detectors. CV technologies allow for some innovative means for data acquisition, and many scholars have attempted to study the dynamic route guidance models in a CV environment [32,34,35].…”