Evacuation through clustering techniques

Abstract

Evacuation and disaster management is of the essence for any advanced society. Ensuring the welfare and well-being of the citizens even in times of immense distress is of utmost importance. Especially in coastal areas where tropical storms and hurricanes pose a threat on a yearly basis, evacuation planning and management is vital. However, modern metropolitan city evacuations prove to be large-scale optimization problems which cannot be tackled in a timely manner with the computational power available. We propose a clustering technique to divide the problem into smaller and easier subproblems and present numerical results that prove our success. © Springer Science+Business Media New York 2013.