A Scenario Planning Approach for Shelter Location and Evacuation Routing

Emergency planning operations are one of the key aspects of Disaster Operations Management (DOM) [1]. This work presents a scenario-based location-allocation-routing model to optimise evacuation planning decisions, including where to establish shelter sites and which routes to arrange to reach them, across different network disruption scenarios. The model considers both supported-evacuation and self-evacuation. The objective is to minimise the duration of the supported-evacuation while guaranteeing that the routes of self-evacuees do not exceed a given travelling time threshold. Both shelter location and routing decisions are optimised so as to identify solutions which perform well across different disruption scenarios. A mathematical formulation of this model is provided, which can be solved through a general-purpose solver optimisation package for modest size instances. Some computational results are reported.