Shelter location and evacuation route assignment under uncertainty: a Benders decomposition approach

Shelters are safe facilities that protect a population from possible damaging effects of a disaster. For that reason, shelter location and traffic assignment decisions should be considered simultaneously for an efficient evacuation plan. In addition, as it is very difficult to anticipate the exact place, time, and scale of a disaster, one needs to take into account the uncertainty in evacuation demand, the disruption/degradation of evacuation road network structure, and the disruption in shelters. In this study, we propose an exact algorithm based on Benders decomposition to solve a scenario-based two-stage stochastic evacuation planning model that optimally locates shelters and that assigns evacuees to shelters and routes in an efficient and fair way to minimize the expected total evacuation time. The second stage of the model is a second-order cone programming problem, and we use duality results for second-order cone programming in a Benders decomposition setting. We solve practical-size problems with up to 1,000 scenarios in moderate CPU times. We investigate methods such as employing a multicut strategy, deriving Pareto-optimal cuts, and using a preemptive priority multiobjective program to enhance the proposed algorithm. We also use a cutting plane algorithm to solve the dual subproblem since it contains a constraint for each possible path. Computational results confirm the efficiency of our algorithms.