Vehicle routing and scheduling for bushfire emergency evacuation

Quick response to evacuate residents within a short-notice in bushfire situation is vital, which can save lives. This translates to make a decision on selecting shelters, assigning the vehicles, finding the optimal routes, and schedules for evacuation. This study proposes a model as a decision support system that can determine the required vehicles their schedule and routes to evacuate late evacuees within the given time windows and fire propagation scenarios. Our model also considers roads availabilities and disruptions. A heuristic solution method is developed to cope with the complex nature of the Vehicle Routing Problem (VRP) based problems. To evaluate the effectiveness of the proposed model, a real case study from Australia is presented.