A Bus Allocation Model for Major Industrial Disasters

The presented research is part of a broader project DIEM-SSP--Disasters and Emergencies Management for Safety and Security in Industrial Plants -aiming at managing major industrial emergencies by considering both medical and engineering/logistics issues. When a disaster occurs, it is necessary to immediately provide relief plans. Many decisions must be made in very short time, which may have a relevant impact on the consequences of the disaster. For an efficient and smart exploitation of available resources, it is necessary to mitigate damages. From a logistics point of view, one of the major issues in the event of a major industrial disaster (fire, explosion or toxic gas dispersion) is to evacuate the external population that can be affected by the disaster to specific evacuation areas. The purpose of the research is to determine the optimal number and allocation of vehicles (buses) which must be involved in order to evacuate the population located in a defined risk area around the emergency site and the optimal location for evacuation areas. For that reasons, a dynamic version of the bus allocation problem is proposed using a mixed-integer programming model.