Cell-transmission-based evacuation planning with rescue teams

The basic ideas of the Cell-Transmission-Model (CTM) by Daganzo (Transp. Res., Part B 28, 269–287, 1994 ) were used in numerous publications dealing with evacuation planning in urban areas. However, none of them consider the assignment of rescue teams which will be needed in case of fire fighting, bomb disposal or evacuating public buildings like hospitals. In such scenarios, traffic capacities are limited and have to be used as efficiently as possible to reduce danger for the population. Rescue teams usually have to enter the network in opposite driving direction to evacuating vehicles so that difficulties in traffic routing are unavoidable. In this paper, we will introduce an extension for the CTM-based Evacuation Planning Model by Kimms and Maassen ( 2012 ) which allows to integrate rescue team (contra-)flow into evacuation planning simultaneously. We formulate our approach in such a way that it should be applicable in most real-world cases. We also present a three-staged heuristic procedure which was able to solve real world cases with up to 8750 vehicles within reasonable time.