Modeling and transportation planning for US noncombatant evacuation operations in South Korea

Abstract

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to investigate US noncombatant evacuation operations (NEO) in South Korea and devise planning and management procedures that improve the efficiency of those missions. Design/methodology/approach It formulates a time-staged network model of the South Korean noncombatant evacuation system as a mixed integer linear program to determine an optimal flow configuration that minimizes the time required to complete an evacuation. This solution considers the capacity and resource constraints of multiple transportation modes and effectively allocates the limited assets across a time-staged network to create a feasible evacuation plan. That solution is post-processed and a vehicle routing procedure then produces a high resolution schedule for each individual asset throughout the entire duration of the NEO. Findings This work makes a clear improvement in the decision-making and resource allocation methodology currently used in a NEO on the Korea peninsula. It immediately provides previously unidentifiable information regarding the scope and requirements of a particular evacuation scenario and then produces an executable schedule for assets to facilitate mission accomplishment. Originality/value The significance of this work is not relegated only to evacuation operations on the Korean peninsula; there are numerous other NEO and natural disaster related scenarios that can benefit from this approach.

Vehicle Routing Optimisation in Humanitarian Operations: A Survey on Modelling and Optimisation Approaches

“…Ref. [116] extended the work of [117] in addressing both the vehicle routing as well as the flow of arrival of evacuees pattern similar to [118], which, according to the author, would improve the effectiveness of the evacuation planning. A network consisting of two sub-network is proposed where the former addressed the maximum flow as well as the earliest arrival pattern flow of evacuees, while the latter is attributed to the vehicle routing of buses in transporting evacuees to a safe shelters with limited capacity.…”

“…A Noncombatant Evacuation Operation (NEO) is considered by [118] to facilitate the decision makers in evacuating civilians as well as other noncombatant in South Korea to a safe location. A time staged network model is proposed as a MILP model with the objective of minimising the required evacuation time.…”

“…[53] addressed the cooperation between air and land transport. More depictions of inter-modal networks are seen in [33,52,90,104,118]. Additionally, the routing problem is not unique to just land vehicles.…”

Modeling and transportation planning for US noncombatant evacuation operations in South Korea

“…Application of the predictive expression and simple adjustment of the parameters represent the most direct way to improve model performance, and it lends invaluable insight for advanced planning by 2ID. For more details see Kearby (2019).…”

A study on how to achieve flexibility in healthcare process: a simulation-based approach

“…It allows decisionmakers to understand the organizational processes better to make decisions to improve overall system performances. DES study has been applied widely in healthcare (Cudney et al, 2019;Rohleder et al, 2011;Zhao et al, 2015), supply chain management (Drakaki and Tzionas, 2019;Sandhu et al, 2013), manufacturing systems (Oleghe and Salonitis, 2019;Yildiz and Møller, 2021), defense (Kearby et al, 2020;Roy et al, 2018) and business process management (Gupta et al, 2021;Sakamoto, 2019).…”