Multi-Stage Equitable Bus-Based Hurricane Evacuation Model With a Stochastic Driver Availability Component

Abstract

Transportation planning before the actual landfall of a hurricane can save lives by allowing evacuees to be transferred from the affected area to shelters in a safe and timely manner. This paper aims to fill an important research gap by proposing a detailed framework for bus-based evacuation planning with fair resource allocation in dense urban areas. We deconstruct the bus-based evacuation problem into multiple stages. Firstly, we identify a subset of existing bus stops to serve as bus pickup locations during the evacuation through the use of an integer programming model. The objective is to minimize the total number of pickup locations while ensuring full coverage of the demand. Secondly, the selected bus pickup locations are assigned to shelters where safe shelters are provided by the government. An equity component was introduced in the shelter assignment stage to ensure fair evacuation resource allocation. Finally, a bus driver management model was proposed that can be used to determine the optimal crew size in bus-based evacuation planning. A hypothetical hurricane evacuation scenario in New York City was used to evaluate the performance of the proposed methodology and the impact of model parameters. The results can provide feasible decisions on identifying bus pickup locations, shelter assignment, as well as the number of drivers needed for transit-based evacuation planning. The equity component shows a noticeable increase in equity index despite it only adding a small cost to the average travel distance.