Integration of simulation and optimization for evacuation planning

Abstract

Evacuation is a time critical process in which the highest priority is to get those people who may be affected by a disaster out of the danger zone as fast as possible. For disaster-prone areas, authorities often distribute evacuation plans well in advance, or encourage the population to prepare themselves for eventual disasters. This paper presents an approach to such planning ahead for evacuation that tightly couples optimization and traffic simulation in order to determine optimal evacuation time and exit from the area for each evacuee. In this paper, we discuss the approach's properties and illustrate its performance using two case studies of wildfire-prone areas in the state of Victoria..