Evacuation Planning for Urban Areas using Public Transit Systems

Proper planning for evacuation during natural disasters such as tsunamis and hurricanes is an important aspect that needs to be taken into account in disaster management. Typical evacuation planning is based on the assumption that evacuees use personal cars. We consider using public transit systems for evacuation in an urban area, as the use of personal cars may not be the best strategy due to congestions in such areas. In this paper, we explicitly consider uncertainty in demand, traveling time, and capacity and propose a robust optimization approach that will help to mitigate the impact of uncertainty. The objective is to maximize the number of people that can be transported from the danger zone to the safe zone.