Global optimization of emergency evacuation assignments

Conventional emergency evacuation plans often assign evacuees to fixed routes or destinations based mainly on geographic proximity. Such approaches can be inefficient if the roads are congested, blocked, or otherwise dangerous because of the emergency. By not constraining evacuees to prespecified destinations, a one-destination evacuation approach provides flexibility in the optimization process. We present a framework for the simultaneous optimization of evacuation-traffic distribution and assignment. Based on the one-destination evacuation concept, we can obtain the optimal destination and route assignment by solving a one-destination traffic-assignment problem on a modified network representation. In a county-wide, large-scale evacuation case study, the one-destination model yields substantial improvement over the conventional approach, with the overall evacuation time reduced by more than 60 percent. More importantly, emergency planners can easily implement this framework by instructing evacuees to go to destinations that the one-destination optimization process selects.