Title: Robust planning models for uncertain emergency evacuation problem

Authors: Yaping Qu; Hui Yu

Addresses: College of Economics and Business Management, Chongqing University, Dormitory No. 12, Campus A, District Shapingba, Chongqing, China ' Chongqing Key Laboratory of Modern Logistics; College of Economics and Business Management, Chongqing University, Campus A, District Shapingba, Chongqing, China

Abstract: In this paper, we formulate the evacuation network planning problem as robust models in which the resulting evacuation planning solutions are immune to the demand uncertainty without known probability distributions in the complex emergency evacuation context. Specifically, this paper considers three types of robust models in which the uncertainty sets are characterised as the box uncertainty set, the ellipsoidal uncertainty set and the polyhedral uncertainty set, respectively. Performance evaluations of the robust models are conducted on a small-sized evacuation network to illustrate the applicability. The results show that the robust solutions are preferable, since it is convenient for planners to obtain the guaranteed feasible solutions within the prescribed uncertainty set. Even if the actual demand realisation exceeds the given set, planners could still find out a desirable evacuation solution with a smaller violation probability. In general, our study provides some useful insights for the emergency evacuation management.

Keywords: emergency evacuation; robust models; demand uncertainty; dynamic traffic assignment; robust planning; emergency planning; emergency management; modelling.

DOI: 10.1504/IJISE.2015.070183

International Journal of Industrial and Systems Engineering, 2015 Vol.20 No.4, pp.415 - 436

Received: 07 Sep 2013
Accepted: 27 Dec 2013
Published online: 29 Jun 2015 *

Full-text access for editors Full-text access for subscribers Purchase this article Comment on this article