Fall 2022 Series

Student Presenter: Dr. Klaas Fiete Krutein, Research Fellow at the National Institute of Health.

Student Advisor: Professor Anne Goodchild and Professor Linda Ng Boyle, Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering and Department of Industrial and Systems Engineering at University of Washington.

Original Air Date: December 12th, 2022

Description

Isolated communities are particularly vulnerable to disasters caused by natural hazards. In many cases, evacuation is the only option to ensure the population’s safety. However, the large body of existing research on evacuation modeling usually considers environments where populations can evacuate via private vehicles and by using an existing road infrastructure. These models are often not applicable to remote valleys and islands, where road connections can be disrupted or do not exist at all. The use of external resources is therefore essential to evacuate the population. This work addresses this knowledge gap by designing a new routing problem called the Isolated Community Evacuation Problem (ICEP) that optimally routes recovery resources between evacuation pick-up points and shelter locations to minimize the total evacuation time. The research presents derivations of the initial model for (a) emergency planning and (b) response purposes to give emergency planners and researchers tools to prepare for and react to an evacuation of an isolated community. An in-depth, real-world case study was conducted in collaboration with first responders and emergency authorities on Bowen Island in Canada is presented to test the applicability of the proposed models. This collaboration demonstrates the potential of full integration of the research with local emergency expertise from the area and highlights the data requirements that need to be met to maximize the use of the model.