An Integrated Road Construction and Resource Planning Approach to the Evacuation of Victims From Single Source to Multiple Destinations

Abstract

This paper presents our study on the emergency resource-planning problem, particularly on the development of a new approach to resource planning through contraflow techniques with consideration of the repair of damaged infrastructures. The contraflow technique is aimed at reversing traffic flows in one or more inbound lanes of a divided highway for the outbound direction. As opposed to the current literature, our approach has the following salient points: (1) simultaneous consideration of contraflow and repair of repair of roads; (2) classification of victims in terms of their problems and urgency in sending them to a safe place or place to be treated; and (3) consideration of multiple destinations for victims. A simulated experiment is also described by comparing our approach with some variations of our approach. The experimental results show that our approach can lead to a reduction in evacuation time by more than 50%, as opposed to the original resource operation on the damaged transportation network, and by about 20%, as opposed to the approach with resource replanning (only) on the damaged network. In addition, the multiobjective optimization algorithm to solve our model can be generalized to other network resource-planning problems under infrastructure damage.