Territory Design for Evacuation Planning

Evacuation planning and territory design both have a natural two-stage structure: in a first step zones/territories are defined, in a second step actions or roles for these zones are being determined. When determining evacuation plans for natural hazards like hurricanes or tsunamis one must determine how to best evacuate citizens in a short amount of time – in particular in large urban areas this is a logistical challenge as traffic routes might congest quickly. Thus, one must determine which citizens should evacuate and which should “shelter at home”. For this purpose, one must first cluster the endangered area into different zones.  Subsequently, one must determine which actions to take in these zones and when to take them.

The master thesis should evaluate the benefit of the following two-step solution approach: in a first step a territory design model is used to decide on evacuation zones. Then, in a second step a Cell Transmission (CT) model is used to decide which actions to do in these zones: evacuate or shelter-at-home. Both models are already available and should be adapted slightly to accommodate the specific requirements of evacuation planning. They should be implemented and the performance of the sequential approach should be evaluated in numerical experiments. The performance of the resulting evacuation plan can be benchmarked against the current state of the art of evacuation planning which is not based on optimization.

Anforderungen: Modellierung, Implementierung, Auswertung

Kontakt: Hannah Bakker