Livestock Evacuation Planning for Natural and Man-made Emergencies

Abstract

On March 11, 2011, Japan was struck by the Great East Japan earthquake followed by a 23-foot tsunami, which crippled the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant. Because of a lack of plans for livestock evacuation in the case of a nuclear power plant accident, local farmers in the Fukushima exclusion zone had significant losses. Development of a rigorous and mathematical formulation of an evacuation plan for livestock in a case of disasters is essential for producers to lessen the financial and emotional impacts. Thus, we propose two mathematical models for evacuation plan for livestock in the area around a nuclear power plant using integer programming over networks. Since solving an evacuation problem on a time dynamic network is NP-hard, we propose algorithms to estimate an optimal solution for our problem. The methods and models discussed herein apply not only to nuclear plant related disasters, but also to a variety of other emergencies.