Determination of Shelter Locations and Evacuation Routes for a Possible Earthquake in the City of Istanbul
M.S. Thesis Presentation by Ceyda Kirikci Department of Industrial Engineering Bilkent University
In this study, the location of disaster response and relief facilities in Istanbul is investigated in view of a possible earthquake. The problem under study is the problem of determining shelter locations and evacuation routes to be used in the aftermath of a possible earthquake. The objective is to evacuate people in limited time from their geographical locations to shelter locations via the street network of metropolitan Istanbul to minimize the average time spent on the way while obeying possible constraints on maximum allowed path lengths, shelter capacities, and road capacities. We propose two mathematical models for this purpose. Model 1 is a path based model in which possible paths that satisfy certain length restrictions are a priori determined by preprocessing the network data. Model 2 is an arc based model that uses the network data directly and creates the paths as a byproduct of the solution. Both models ensure that each demand node is served by at least one shelter node in accordance with road and shelter capacities. We examine the effects of the number of shelters to be opened, capacity restrictions on shelters as well as additional capacity restrictions on streets of the network that impose upper bounds on the total traffic that can be routed through a given street in a maximum allowed evacuation time. Related “what if” analysis is also provided to study how the evacuation process and evacuees are affected if critical arcs or nodes of the network are disabled.
This thesis is supervised by Prof. Barbaros Tansel
