Flow Improvement in Evacuation Planning with Budget Constrained Switching Costs

Abstract

Many large-scale natural and human-created disasters have drawn the attention of researchers towards the solutions of evacuation planning problems and their applications. The main focus of these solution strategies is to protect the life, property, and their surroundings during the disasters. With limited resources, it is not an easy task to develop a universally accepted model to handle such issues. Among them, the budget-constrained network flow improvement approach plays significant role to evacuate the maximum number of people within the given time horizon. In this paper, we consider an evacuation planning problem that aims to shift a maximum number of evacuees from a danger area to a safe zone in limited time under the budget constraints for network modification. Different flow improvement strategies with respect to fixed switching cost will be investigated, namely, integral, rational, and either to increase the full capacity of an arc or not at all. A solution technique on static network is extended to the dynamic one. Moreover, we introduce the static and dynamic maximum flow problems with lane reversal strategy and also propose efficient algorithms for their solutions. Here, the contraflow approach reverses the direction of arcs with respect to the lane reversal costs to increase the flow value. As an implementation of an evacuation plan may demand a large cost, the solutions proposed here with budget constrained problems play important role in practice.