Large-scale zone-based evacuation planning—Part I: Models and algorithms

In zone-based evacuation planning, the region to evacuate is divided into zones, and each zone must be assigned a path to safety and departure times along the path. Zone-based evacuations are highly desirable in practice because they allow emergency services to communicate evacuation orders and to control the evacuation more precisely. Zone-based evacuations may also be combined with contraflows (to maximize the network capacities) and may impose additional constraints on the evacuation path (e.g., path convergence) and the departure times (e.g., non-preemption). This paper synthesizes existing models and algorithms for large-scale zone-based evacuation planning and complements them with some new ones to fill some of the gaps in the design space. Each model and algorithm is also extended to accommodate contraflows. A companion paper evaluates them on a real, large-scale case study, both from a macroscopic standpoint and through microscopic simulations under a variety of assumptions.