Solving the bus evacuation problem and its variants

•For the Bus Evacuation Problem (BEP) we propose a new two-index formulation.•Proposed a new variant of BEP to address the Casualty Evacuation Problem.•Integrated LNS, VNS and Column Generation to solve problems of practical size.

In this paper we address the problem of transporting passengers from their origins to multiple gathering centers. We consider two interesting and related cases of this transportation problem: (a) the case of evacuation in anticipation of major natural threats, and (b) the case of transporting casualties after an emergency or terrorist incident, or from a battlefield. Both problem cases share common characteristics and restrictions, i.e. limited available vehicles and limited capacity of the collection/gathering centers, but differ in terms of objectives and the scale of demand. To address the evacuation problem and its variants we have proposed two-index, mixed integer, linear formulations, and we have developed a Hybrid Solution Framework. Extensive experimental results indicate that for both cases the proposed framework provides efficient solutions in reasonable computational times.