Efficient evacuation strategies for emergency response management

Abstract

Due to the frequent occurrence of disasters worldwide, an evacuation is no longer a rare event. Planning for evacuation is an essential step of emergency response management for several disasters. As the life of people is at stake, evacuation must be safe and quick. For this, it is important to know how the evacuation process will evolve and how it can be made efficient. Accordingly, this review article presents various evacuation strategies developed in the past to make the evacuation process efficient. The scope of this review is to cover the transportation planning aspect of evacuation, provide the steps needed to be considered by the decision-maker to model the evacuation process, and then develop strategies to make it efficient. Based on the review, a framework is presented to help decisionmakers make effective decisions for a given scenario. Finally, this study also highlights the aspects of evacuation planning not addressed adequately in the literature and, hence, suitable for future work. © 2022 Weston Medical Publishing. All rights reserved.