A basic mathematical model for evacuation problems in urban areas

• Published in: Transportation research. Part A, Policy and practice Policy and practice, 2011-07, Vol.45 (6), p.523-539
• Main Authors: Bretschneider, S., Kimms, A.
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: Applied sciences; Buildings. Public works; Evacuation; Evacuation LP-based heuristic Mathematical programming; Exact sciences and technology; Ground, air and sea transportation, marine construction; LP-based heuristic; Mathematical programming; Urban development
• ISSN: 0965-8564; 1879-2375
• DOI: 10.1016/j.tra.2011.03.008

► A detailed mathematical program for evacuating urban areas is provided. ► Decision support for street usage in contraflow direction is given. ► Conflicts with regard to crossing and merging traffic flows are taken into account. ► Heuristics are proposed. ► Evacuation time can be estimated. Real life situations like floods, hurricanes or chemical accidents may cause the evacuation of a certain area to rescue the affected population. To enable a fast and a safe evacuation a basic mixed-integer evacuation model has been developed that provides a reorganization of the traffic routing of a certain area for the case of an evacuation. This basic problem of evacuation minimizes the evacuation-time while prohibiting conflicts within intersections. Our evacuation model is a dynamic network flow problem with additional variables for the number and direction of used lanes and with additional complicating constraints. Because of the size of the time-expanded network, the computational effort required by standard software is already very high for tiny instances. To deal with realistic instances we propose a heuristic approach.