Abstract: Natural calamities like floods and tsunamis severely impact human life every year. Safe evacuation procedures are essential to take into account during natural catastrophes to protect lives. During the evacuation process, there are several things to consider, including the evacuees’ mode of transportation, the route that will move them to safety, the residents’ present medical problems, and much more. In this paper, we proposed a multi-objective optimization model for minimizing the total transportation distance during the evacuation of people as well as minimizing the total average empty space in the community’s evacuation place to allow for the evacuation of the maximum possible number of people. The developed mathematical model ensures the fairness of the evacuation procedure so that all residents of the affected areas can have equal priority during the evacuation process before the catastrophic natural hazard. After that, the optimization is applied to Seaside, a small town in Oregon that frequently experiences the effects of various natural disasters. Because tsunamis are so deadly for human beings, there is only a concise window of time during which we have to evacuate about 5,000 people or more. This research reveals that the fair evacuation procedure strongly relies on the mode of transportation and capacity. Furthermore, this study also presents the importance of fairness in the evacuation process and the impact of considering fairness in the evacuation process during natural disasters.
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