A two-stage process for emergency evacuation planning: Shelter assignment and routing

Abstract

With the rapid growth of population and volume of urban flows, cities have become more vulnerable to uneven natural and man-made disasters. In this chapter, we applied a two-stage approach to first find the most appropriate sites for shelters based on the multi-criteria decision-making (MCDM) technique, then an algorithm for determining the best routes of evacuation under an emergency situation was examined. Two well-known scenarios Capacity-Aware Shortest Path Evacuation Routing (CASPER) and the Shortest Path (SP) were applied, then the results were compared together. The CASPER scenario, based on the navigation time and traffic volume of the network, required a longer navigation distance than the SP scenario, although it considered road capacity and the volume of traffic, in conjunction with the minimization of total evacuation time. The case study of research was the City of Sadra, a new town in southern Iran, in the Middle East.