Robust stochastic vehicle routing and scheduling for bushfire emergency evacuation: An Australian case study

This study proposes a stochastic modeling approach as an evacuation decision support system to determine the required vehicles, scheduling and routes under uncertainties in evacuee population, time windows and bushfire propagation. The proposed model also considers road availability and disruptions. A greedy solution method is developed to cope with the complex nature of vehicle routing problem. Furthermore, the effectiveness of the proposed solution is evaluated by comparison with a designed genetic algorithm on sets of various numerical examples. The model is then applied on the real case study of the 2009 Black Saturday bushfires in Victoria, Australia. Several plausible evacuation scenarios are generated, utilizing the historical data of Black Saturday. The results are analyzed using the frequency approach to determine the optimal evacuation plan. The results show that it would have been possible to evacuate the late evacuees on Black Saturday, even within hard time windows and a maximum population.