Evacuation Route Planning for Alternative Fuel Vehicles

TL;DR

This paper introduces a novel evacuation route planning method for alternative fuel vehicles, considering refueling needs and infrastructure, using advanced algorithms to optimize safety and efficiency during emergencies.

Contribution

It formulates a new seamless evacuation route problem incorporating refueling constraints and develops a branch-and-price algorithm to solve it effectively.

Findings

Refueling infrastructure and vehicle range significantly impact evacuation routes.

Unique routes are often required for different fuel types.

Driving range constraints can increase evacuation time by up to 7.32%.

Abstract

As the number of adopted alternative fuel vehicles increases, it is crucial for communities (especially those that are susceptible to hazards) to make evacuation plans that account for such vehicles refueling needs. During emergencies that require preemptive evacuation planning, travelers using alternative fuel vehicles are vulnerable when evacuation routes do not provide access to refueling stations on their way to shelters. In this paper, we formulate and solve a novel seamless evacuation route plan problem, by designing $k$-minimum spanning trees with hop constraints that capture the refueling needs of each $k \in K$ vehicle fuel type on their way to reach a shelter. We develop a branch-and-price algorithm based on a matheuristic column generation approach to solve the evacuation problem. We apply the proposed framework to the Sioux Falls transportation network with existing infrastructure deployment and present numerical experiments. Specifically, we discuss the evacuation travel and refueling times under scenarios of various alternative fuel vehicles driving ranges. Our findings show that the characteristics of each vehicle fuel type, like driving range and the refueling infrastructure topology, play a pivotal role in determining evacuation route plans. This means that an evacuation route could prove unique to a single vehicle fuel type, while being infeasible to the others. Finally, we observe that the driving range constraints could force evacuee vehicles to detour to meet their refueling needs before reaching safety and increase the total evacuation time by 7.32 % in one of the evaluated scenarios.