Supported Evacuation for Disaster Relief through Lexicographic Goal Programming

Disasters have been striking human-beings from the beginning of history and their
management is a global concern of the international community. Minimizing the impact and
consequences of these disasters, both natural and human-made, involves many decision and logistic
processes that should be optimized. A crucial logistic problem is the evacuation of the affected
population, and the focus of this paper is the planning of supported evacuation of vulnerable people
to safe places when necessary. A lexicographic goal programming model for supported evacuation is
proposed, whose main novelties are the classification of potential evacuees according to their health
condition, so that they can be treated accordingly; the introduction of dynamism regarding the arrival
of potential evacuees to the pickup points, according to their own susceptibility about the disaster
and the joint consideration of objectives such us number of evacuated people, operation time and
cost, among which no trade-off is possible. The performance of the proposed model is evaluated
through a realistic case study regarding the earthquake and tsunami that hit Palu (Indonesia) in
September 2018.