Planning for a bus-based evacuation

Planning for a bus-based regional evacuation is essential for emergency preparedness, especially for regions threatened by hurricanes that have large numbers of transit-dependent people. While this difficult planning problem is a variant of the vehicle routing problem, it differs in some key aspects, including the objective and the network structure (e.g., capacitated shelters). This problem is not well studied. In this paper we introduce a model specifically designed for bus-based evacuation planning, along with two mathematical programming formulations, which are used to develop a heuristic algorithm. Using these models, we analyze the differences in the structural properties of optimal solutions between this problem and traditional vehicle routing problems.