ABSTRACT
Natural or human-made disasters often force individuals to evacuate to safer places. Depending on the nature of the disaster, evacuations may require people to travel short distances or long distances, and may affect a city, multiple states, or at times an entire nation. From a transportation perspective, resource constraints such as limited roadway capacity and vehicle availability restrict the ability to plan a safe and efficient evacuation. The chapter discusses the difficulties that surround a large-scale evacuation and presents a summary of studies that use mathematical models to address these problems. It highlights some of the challenges in post-disaster management. The chapter describes modeling approaches to forecast the decisions, and how simulation tools built on the principles can support advance planning for evacuations. Vehicle availability also plays a major role in evacuation, even in regions with a high per-capita automobile ownership rate, since households without automobiles often have fewer resources in general.
