Establishing an Evacuation Network: A Path Ranking Approach

Abstract

The evacuation of population exposed to flood hazard requires the establishment of a specific transportation network. This is to compute escape routes to be taken by affected population. At evacuation time, inhabitants of affected area must be evacuated through transportation network to safety area. The main objective of this work is to provide assistance to rescue forces in terms of accessibility by providing itinieraries between buildings at risk of flooding and safety points equipped for this purpose. Technically, the problem of k-shortest paths between two nodes in network has been extensively studied in the literature offering several efficient algorithms for different applications. Those algorithms so-called ranking methods aim to compute the first shortest path then the second one and so on. It’s well known that the computation in ranking methods is based only on one criterion which is generally distance or time. Often a single criterion is not sufficient in some real-world problems (road network, internet, etc.,) where one or several supplementary criteria (such as cost, capacity, security, etc.,) must also be taken into consideration. This multi-criteria optimization so-called labeling method aims to compute a Pareto front that represents a set of non-dominated paths. However it is very difficult to take a decision on which k-paths to select among this set and especially when selected paths are served as a data input for a sensitive problem such as the evacuation. We contribute in this paper to establish an evacuation network dedicated to the evacuation of population exposed to natural hazards and more particularly to flood hazard. Two ranking methods to compute paths between each origin (building) - destination (shelter) pair are presented. The criteria free-flow travel time, capacity and number of lanes of road are considered in computing paths. Thus we aim in the proposed ranking approach to simulate a multi-criteria aspect by combining travel time and number of lanes as weight function. The establishment of network (determination of k-paths between each building and shelter associated) is then performed according to several measures we introduce in this paper.