Issuing of evacuation orders have been found to accelerate the rate at which people evacuate. Inefficient issuance of orders would result in high rate of loading from the origins, leading to avoidable congestion, and putting people most vulnerable to the disaster at high risk. Therefore, scheduling of evacuation orders has been found to be an important strategy to ensure safe and quick movement of people from harms way. In this paper a newand more robust optimization model is proposed to determine the time at which evacuation orders should be given at different locations at risk. Utilizing this optimization model the schedule for issuing evacuation orders in Tampa, Plant City and Lakeland are determined. The paper discusses the advantages of this methodology and future work.
Abstract