Integration of simulation and optimization for evacuation planning

•Coupling of optimization and simulation ensures a better informed, more realistic picture of what would happen in a disaster.•Evaluation uses real-world scenarios with realistic population numbers.•Results illustrate highlight the importance of road network topology and population distribution in evacuation.

Evacuation is a time critical process in which the highest priority is to get those people who may be affected by a disaster out of the danger zone as fast as possible. For disaster-prone areas, authorities often distribute evacuation plans well in advance, or encourage the population to prepare themselves for eventual disasters. This paper presents an approach to such planning ahead for evacuation that tightly couples optimization and traffic simulation in order to determine optimal evacuation time and exit from the area for each evacuee. In this paper, we discuss the approach’s properties and illustrate its performance using two case studies of wildfire-prone areas in the state of Victoria, Australia. The results show that our approach can lead to significant improvements when compared to ad-hoc evacuation, but these improvements also strongly depend on population density and road network topology. More generally, our research highlights the significant benefits of tightly coupling optimization and simulation for evacuation modeling.