Operations Research in Disaster Management

During an evacuation, the responsible authorities need to make plenty of decisions in short time, while their impact is hard to foresee. Such decisions include: Where should we evacuate to? How long will that take?

What is the risk, what are the costs? In this talk, I describe the current process on a decision support system to help answer these questions, which is developed in a German-French research project. A central piece is the solution of a large multi-criteria mixed-integer program, for which we developed a genetic algorithm. I point out further challenges and research questions, such as the inclusion of uncertainty, and present experience on real-world problems.