| Theoretical and Practical Issues of Evacuation Planning in Urban Areas (2008) | |||||||||||||||
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| In December 2004, the Sumatra-Andaman earthquake occurred. It triggered tsunamis, and tragedy fell upon many people. Not only earthquakes but also diverse disasters occurred and caused serious damages in many countries. Therefore it is very important to establish crisis management systems against large-scale disasters such as big earthquakes, conflagrations and tsunamis to secure evacuation pathways and to effectively guide residents to a safe place. The problem for finding the most effective plan to evacuate people to safe place has been modelled as an evacuation problem by using dynamic network flow. In the evacuation problem, we are given a directed graph D = (V, A) which consists of a vertex set V with supply b(v) on every vertex v and an arc set A with capacity c(e) and transit time τ(e) on every arc e and a single sink s ∈ V. If we consider urban evacuation, vertices model buildings, rooms, exits and so on, and arcs model pathways or roads. For an arc e, capacity c(e) represents the number of people which can traverse e per unit time, and transit time τ(e) represents the time required to traverse e. For any vertex v, supply b(v) represents the number of people which exist at v. The evacuation problem asks to find the minimum time required to send all the supplies to a sink. | |||||||||||||||
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