Multi-Constraints and Single Objective Based Optimum Routes Planning for Assisted Evacuation - A Geographic Information System Based Solution and Simulation

Md. Imran Hossain

2014

Abstract

In an event of disaster, evacuation of the peoples who are at high risk, often become obvious to minimize the casualties. Among the evacuees, there are always special groups of people who are subject to severe mobility restrictions in terms of lack of personal transportation, limited financial resources, unfamiliarity with the area and its road network, physical and mental disabilities, language barrier etc. and therefore are at great risk of casualties. The responsible authorities (public safety agencies, police department etc.) for evacuation provide special evacuation units (vehicles) to collect and shift those special groups to a safe place which is called assisted evacuation. The route plan for each evacuation unit has significant effects on the efficiency of such assisted evacuation. The contemporary manual route planning with unknown spatial evacuee distribution hinders the performance of assisted evacuation in many folds. First of all, the evacuation units have to go through all the streets of a given area of evacuation which usually lead to a substantial waste of time and therefore become very inefficient especially when the evacuation is bounded by huge time pressure. Secondly, the manual process is unable to give estimation for the required/optimum number of evacuation units to cover all the evacuees who need assistance. And finally it cannot provide estimation for evacuees to be covered under certain time and resource constraints. Therefore, with a known spatial distribution of the evacuees, an automatic dynamic routing producing optimum path for the evacuation units would certainly preside over the any manual interventions in this case. The performance of assisted evacuation of an area depends on the route plan of each evacuation unit together with at least three major factors or variables: 1) Total available time (T): the time segment between the announcement of an evacuation and the actual disaster event, 2) Total available evacuation units (U) and 3) Number of evacuees (E): the number of the evacuees who need assistance. Therefore, a decision support system that can deliver the optimum paths for all the evacuation units in a dynamic way (alternative paths during run time) by fixing any two variables/factors and keeping the third as a goal would enable the incident manager for estimating the required resources and to take the right decision in a given evacuation scenario. Along with the optimized route plans the decision support system should answer the three basic questions. Firstly, how many evacuees (E) could be evacuated under certain time (T) and resource (U) constraints? Secondly, how many evacuation units (U) would be required to evacuate a certain number of evacuees (E) under a certain time (T) constraint? And finally, How long (T) would it take to evacuate certain amount of evacuees (E) with certain number of evacuation units (U)? This research project is therefore intended to develop such kind of decision support system (DSS). The DSS would be further tested, verified and validated by a suitable simulation technology.

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Paper Citation


in Harvard Style

Hossain M. (2014). Multi-Constraints and Single Objective Based Optimum Routes Planning for Assisted Evacuation - A Geographic Information System Based Solution and Simulation . In Doctoral Consortium - DCSIMULTECH, (SIMULTECH 2014) ISBN Not Available, pages 35-41


in Bibtex Style

@conference{dcsimultech14,
author={Md. Imran Hossain},
title={Multi-Constraints and Single Objective Based Optimum Routes Planning for Assisted Evacuation - A Geographic Information System Based Solution and Simulation},
booktitle={Doctoral Consortium - DCSIMULTECH, (SIMULTECH 2014)},
year={2014},
pages={35-41},
publisher={SciTePress},
organization={INSTICC},
doi={},
isbn={Not Available},
}


in EndNote Style

TY - CONF
JO - Doctoral Consortium - DCSIMULTECH, (SIMULTECH 2014)
TI - Multi-Constraints and Single Objective Based Optimum Routes Planning for Assisted Evacuation - A Geographic Information System Based Solution and Simulation
SN - Not Available
AU - Hossain M.
PY - 2014
SP - 35
EP - 41
DO -