Optimization of Evacuation Warnings Prior to a Hurricane Disaster

Dian Sun, Jee Eun Kang, Rajan Batta and Yan Song
Additional contact information
Dian Sun: School of Economics and Management, Harbin Engineering University, Harbin 150001, China
Jee Eun Kang: Industrial and Systems Engineering, University at Buffalo, Buffalo, NY 14260, USA
Rajan Batta: Industrial and Systems Engineering, University at Buffalo, Buffalo, NY 14260, USA
Yan Song: School of Economics and Management, Harbin Engineering University, Harbin 150001, China

Sustainability, 2017, vol. 9, issue 11, 1-29

Abstract: The key purpose of this paper is to demonstrate that optimization of evacuation warnings by time period and impacted zone is crucial for efficient evacuation of an area impacted by a hurricane. We assume that people behave in a manner consistent with the warnings they receive. By optimizing the issuance of hurricane evacuation warnings, one can control the number of evacuees at different time intervals to avoid congestion in the process of evacuation. The warning optimization model is applied to a case study of Hurricane Sandy using the study region of Brooklyn. We first develop a model for shelter assignment and then use this outcome to model hurricane evacuation warning optimization, which prescribes an evacuation plan that maximizes the number of evacuees. A significant technical contribution is the development of an iterative greedy heuristic procedure for the nonlinear formulation, which is shown to be optimal for the case of a single evacuation zone with a single evacuee type case, while it does not guarantee optimality for multiple zones under unusual circumstances. A significant applied contribution is the demonstration of an interface of the evacuation warning method with a public transportation scheme to facilitate evacuation of a car-less population. This heuristic we employ can be readily adapted to the case where response rate is a function of evacuation number in prior periods and other variable factors. This element is also explored in the context of our experiment.

Keywords: hurricane disaster; evacuation warning; risk communication; evacuation decision-making; hurricane evacuation planning (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: O13 Q Q0 Q2 Q3 Q5 Q56 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2017
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.mdpi.com/2071-1050/9/11/2152/pdf (application/pdf)
https://www.mdpi.com/2071-1050/9/11/2152/ (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:gam:jsusta:v:9:y:2017:i:11:p:2152-:d:119934

Access Statistics for this article

Sustainability is currently edited by Ms. Alexandra Wu

More articles in Sustainability from MDPI
Bibliographic data for series maintained by MDPI Indexing Manager ().