Dynamic Evacuation Routing Plan after an Earthquake

Abstract

This study proposes an earthquake evacuation routing plan from local shelters to regional ones for a long-term safe settlement using public vehicles. In a post-earthquake situation, the unpredicted changes in travel demand patterns and accessibility conditions of the transportation network affect the travel time. The contribution of this study is to propose a dynamic evacuation routing approach that can update the routing plan by incorporating time-dependent travel times. The problem is modeled as a vehicle routing problem and a two-stage solution procedure based on the simulated annealing algorithm is developed. The model is applied in part of Tehran’s transportation network. The results confirm that the dynamic evacuation routing approach is able to increase the number of evacuated shelters and decrease both the evacuation time and total travel time of the vehicles. The findings in this study indicate that the application of the proposed model can provide beneficial information for disaster management.