NICTA evacuation planner: actionable evacuation plans with contraflows

Abstract

Evacuations are a critical aspect of disaster management, and generally the first prevention measure to ensure the safety of the population under threat. Designing evacuation plans is a complex task that requires to take into account multiple factors in order to limit congestion and ensure that all evacuees reach safety in time. This paper proposes a conflict-based path-generation algorithm for evacuation planning and a web-based intelligent system targeted at local authorities and emergency services. The key contribution of this paper is to propose the first scalable approach to produce actionable evacuation plans that simultaneously schedules the evacuation and selects contraflow roads. The benefits of the approach are illustrated on two large-scale case studies. The resulting optimization model is integrated in NICTA EVACUATION PLANNER, a tool to model, plan, and simulate evacuations.