Evacuation Transportation Planning Under Uncertainty: A Robust Optimization Approach

This paper considers evacuation via surface transportation networks in an uncertain environment. We focus on demand uncertainty which can lead to significant infeasibility cost during evacuation, where loss of life or property may appear. We develop a robust linear programming model based on a robust optimization approach where hard constraints are guaranteed within an appropriate uncertainty set. The robust counterpart solutions have been shown tractable. We show that the robustness in evacuation is important and a robust solution outperforms a nominal deterministic solution in both quality and feasibility.