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The sink location problem is a combination of network flow and location problems: From a given set of nodes in a flow network a minimum cost subset \(W\) has to be selected such that given supplies can be transported to the nodes in \(W\). In contrast to its counterpart, the source location problem which has already been studied in the literature, sinks have, in general, a limited capacity. Sink location has a decisive application in evacuation planning, where the supplies correspond to the number of evacuees and the sinks to emergency shelters.
We classify sink location problems according to capacities on shelter nodes, simultaneous or non-simultaneous flows, and single or multiple assignments of evacuee groups to shelters. Resulting combinations are interpreted in the evacuation context and analyzed with respect to their worst-case complexity status.
There are several approaches to tackle these problems: Generic solution methods for uncapacitated problems are based on source location and modifications of the network. In the capacitated case, for which source location cannot be applied, we suggest alternative approaches which work in the original network. It turns out that latter class algorithms are superior to the former ones. This is established in numerical tests including random data as well as real world data from the city of Kaiserslautern, Germany.
The Bus Evacuation Problem (BEP) is a vehicle routing problem that arises in emergency planning. It models the evacuation of a region from a set of collection points to a set of capacitated shelters with the help of buses, minimizing the time needed to bring the last person out of the endangered region.
In this work, we describe multiple approaches for finding both lower and upper bounds for the BEP, and apply them in a branch and bound framework. Several node pruning techniques and branching rules are discussed. In computational experiments, we show that solution times of our approach are significantly improved compared to a commercial integer programming solver.
We consider the problem of evacuating a region with the help of buses. For a given set of possible collection points where evacuees gather, and possible shelter locations where evacuees are brought to, we need to determine both collection points and shelters we would like to use, and bus routes that evacuate the region in minimum time.
We model this integrated problem using an integer linear program, and present a branch-cut-and-price algorithm that generates bus tours in its pricing step. In computational experiments we show that our approach is able to solve instances of realistic size in sufficient time for practical application, and considerably outperforms the usage of a generic ILP solver.
We consider the problem of evacuating an urban area caused by a natural or man-made disaster. There are several planning aspects that need to be considered in such a scenario, which are usually considered separately, due to their computational complexity. These aspects include: Which shelters are used to accommodate evacuees? How to schedule public transport for transit-dependent evacuees? And how do public and individual traffic interact? Furthermore, besides evacuation time, also the risk of the evacuation needs to be considered.
We propose a macroscopic multi-criteria optimization model that includes all of these questions simultaneously. As a mixed-integer programming formulation cannot handle instances of real-world size, we develop a genetic algorithm of NSGA-II type that is able to generate feasible solutions of good quality in reasonable computation times.
We extend the applicability of these methods by also considering how to aggregate instance data, and how to generate solutions for the original instance starting from a reduced solution.
In computational experiments using real-world data modelling the cities of Nice in France and Kaiserslautern in Germany, we demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach and compare the trade-off between different levels of data aggregation.