A Fuzzy Evacuation Management Model Oriented Toward the Mitigation of Emissions

Although the transportation sector is a major contributor to urban air pollution and global climate change due to its substantial energy consumptions, previous studies for evacuation practices in this sector seldom took environmental consequences into account. As an attempt in event-related evacuation planning under uncertainty, this study proposed an emission-mitigation-oriented fuzzy evacuation management (emoFEM) model. Comprehensive considerations over system efficiency, environmental protection, economic cost and resource availability were incorporated within a general modeling formulation to facilitate evacuation management in a systematic and compromise manner. Vague and ambiguous information embedded within evacuation problems could be quantified and directly communicated into the optimization process, greatly improving conventional tools for evacuation management under uncertainty. The proposed emoFEM model was then applied to a hypothetic but representative case. Useful solutions were generated, which could help identify timely, safe and cost-effective evacuation schemes without significant disturbances over normal municipal traffic and environmental quality. The advantages of emoFEM were further revealed through comparing its solutions with those from its deterministic counterpart.