Evacuation route planning for alternative fuel vehicles

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| spanning trees with side constraints that capture the refueling needs of each k & ISIN; K vehicle fuel type on their way to reach a shelter. We develop a branch-and-price matheuristic algorithm based on column generation to solve the evacuation route planning problem. We apply the proposed framework to the Sioux Falls transportation network with existing infrastructure deployment and present numerical experiments. Specifically, we discuss the optimal system evacuation travel and refueling times under scenarios of various alternative fuel vehicle 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 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 evaluated scenarios.

Automated summary

This paper investigates the problem of evacuation planning for alternative fuel vehicles and proposes a novel algorithm to solve it. The study reveals the significant role of each vehicle fuel type's characteristics in determining evacuation routes, and shows that driving range constraints can increase the total evacuation time.