Intelligent Shelter Allotment for Emergency Evacuation Planning: A Case Study of Makkah

Given maps of an evacuee population, shelter destinations, and a transportation network, the goal of intelligent shelter allotment (ISA) is to assign routes, exits, and shelters to evacuees for quick and safe evacuation. ISA is important due to emergency planning and response applications, but it´s also challenging due to movement conflicts and transportation-network choke points. Current practices based on the nearest exit or shelter (NES) paradigm and computational approaches such as capacity-constrained route planning (CCRP) have shortcomings in meeting these challenges. The authors of this article propose a novel approach--Crowd-separated Allocation of Routes, Exits and Shelters (CARES)--based on the idea of spatial anomaly avoidance. Experiments case study regarding Hajj in Makkah, Saudi Arabia, show that CARES meets both challenges by providing faster evacuation than NES and much lesser evacuee movement conflict risk than CCRP.