Max-Flow Rate Priority Algorithm for Evacuation Route Planning

Given a transportation network with multiple source vertexes, multiple destination vertexes, and a certain number of evacuees, it's significant to generate an optimal route schedule to complete evacuation in the shortest possible time. This paper proposes a heuristic approach to solve the evacuation route planning problem with capacity constrained transportation network. At first, we obtain multiple candidate routes. Each vertex in these candidate routes has available residual capacity on its predictive arrived time step. Then, a Max-Flow Rate Priority (MFRP) algorithm is designed to iteratively select the evacuation routes with maximum flow rate by time step marching. After that, MFRP updates the potential available capacity of the transportation network for the next iteration. MFRP improves the performance of the evacuation route planning as its high-velocity evacuee stream. The experimental results on different datasets indicate that the proposed approach can produce well-performed tactic for the evacuation route planning problem.