A spatiotemporal optimization model for the evacuation of the population exposed to flood hazard

Abstract

Abstract. Managing the crisis caused by natural disasters, and especially by floods, requires the development of effective evacuation systems. An effective evacuation system must take into account certain constraints, including those related to traffic network, accessibility, human resources and material equipment (vehicles, collecting points, etc.). The main objective of this work is to provide assistance to technical services and rescue forces in terms of accessibility by offering itineraries relating to rescue and evacuation of people and property. We consider in this paper the evacuation of an urban area of medium size exposed to the hazard of flood. In case of inundation, most people will be evacuated using their own vehicles. Two evacuation types are addressed in this paper: (1) a preventive evacuation based on a flood forecasting system and (2) an evacuation during the disaster based on flooding scenarios. The two study sites on which the developed evacuation model is applied are the Tours valley (Fr, 37), which is protected by a set of dikes (preventive evacuation), and the Gien valley (Fr, 45), which benefits from a low rate of flooding (evacuation before and during the disaster). Our goal is to construct, for each of these two sites, a chronological evacuation plan, i.e., computing for each individual the departure date and the path to reach the assembly point (also called shelter) according to a priority list established for this purpose. The evacuation plan must avoid the congestion on the road network. Here we present a spatiotemporal optimization model (STOM) dedicated to the evacuation of the population exposed to natural disasters and more specifically to flood risk.

Multi-coverage optimal location model for emergency medical service (EMS) facilities under various disaster scenarios: a case study of urban fluvial floods in the Minhang district of Shanghai, China

“…However, the risks faced by cities are not only fluvial floods but also other major events such as earthquakes, mudslides, and pluvial floods. In addition, the evacuation plan of the population exposed to these hazards should be considered (Alaeddine et al, 2015). Future research should comprehensively consider a variety of these hazards, conduct risk assessments of the study area quantitatively, and select the location of urban emergency facilities according to different geographical conditions to improve the efficiency of emergency response.…”

“…In terms of emergency management, when fluvial flood disasters occur, roads near rivers become inundated, leading to traffic congestion and road closures, which affect ambulance response times. The failure part of the transport infrastructure would have the most significant effects on access to specific locations and the EMS system performance (Albano et al, 2014). Studies have shown that when road inundation reaches a depth of 30 cm, the roads become impassable to vehicles (Yin et al, 2016;Green et al, 2017).…”

Establishing an Evacuation Network: A Path Ranking Approach

“…In our evacuation model STOM 1 , we consider only the first three shortest paths (k = 3) provided by k− min between each origin-destination. Indeed, it is not easy for residents to recongnize more than 3 different paths from their building to the shelter associated (Alaeddine et al, 2015). The next section justify this choice.…”

“…Several steps are required to simulate the evacuation of an urban area such as the preparation of spatial database (urban network, buildings to be evacuated and safety points), the establishment of evacuation network, the minimization of total evacuation time and the feasibility of evacuation plan (Alaeddine et al, 2015). We are interested in this paper by the establishment of evacuation network in case of preventive evacuation.…”

Kalman-filter based stochastic-multiobjective network optimization and maximal-distance Latin hypercube sampling for uncertain inundation evacuation planning

“…Hence, inundation evacuation planning is an important consideration 35 for preventing the loss of life and property damage (Li et al40 Muhammad et al, 2017). The majority of evacuation planning problems are formulated and solved as network programming models (Yi and Ozdamar, 2007;Stepanov and Smith, 2009;Bretschneider, 2012;Fraser et al, 2014;Alaeddine et al, 2015). Such network programming models have been proposed by Ford and Fulkerson (1958), and these models are capable of determining the minimal distance or maximal flow transported from sources to sink nodes.…”