Fair dynamic resource allocation in transit-based evacuation planning

Resource allocation in transit-based emergency evacuation is studied in this paper. The goal is to find a method for allocation of resources to communities in an evacuation process which is (1) fair, (2) reasonably efficient, and (3) able to dynamically adapt to the changes to the emergency situation. Four variations of the resource allocation problem, namely maximum rate, minimum clearance time, maximum social welfare, and proportional fair resource allocation, are modeled and compared. It is shown that the optimal answer to each problem can be found efficiently. Additionally, a distributed and dynamic algorithm based on the Lagrangian dual approach, called PFD2A, is developed to find the proportional fair allocation of resources and update the evacuation process in real time whenever new information becomes available. Numerical results for a sample scenario are presented.