Critical Infrastructure Detection During an Evacuation with Alternative Fuel Vehicles

Alternative fuel vehicles adoption is rapidly growing in many urban and suburban locations around the world. These new vehicle technologies require new refueling infrastructure. Their accessibility, especially during a hazardous event or other threat, is of utmost importance for societal response and recovery. Hence, in this work, we first propose a new evacuation planning model inspired by Purba et al. (Transp. Res. Part C Emerg. Technol. 143:103837 (2022)). Then, we note that an adversary could severely hurt our evacuation plan by attacking specific locations either through misinformation campaigns, cyberattacks, or physical attacks. To help protect against such adversarial actions, we propose a new bilevel problem that aims to identify the most important roads in our evacuation plan. Finally, to solve the problem we propose a novel side-constrained betweenness metric and a corresponding heuristic. Our framework can prove valuable to evacuation management, enabling identification of the most critical roads and their fortification prior to an evacuation event; it can also help design effective “Plan B” evacuation operations in the case of an attack.