2011-2014 DSS : Decision Support System for Large-Scale Evacuation Logistics

Decision Support System for Large-Scale Evacuation Logistics 

In this project, we consider the problem of large-scale evacuation of medium-sized cities, in situations where the evacuees must change their place of residence for a period ranging from several days to several months. We consider the full chain of events that can occur in such a situation: developing a strategy for assessing the need to initiate an evacuation, estimate logistic aspects related to planning and transportation, location of collection centers and care for evacuees, …

We will study what are the methods of the industrial logistics that can be used or adapted, and which are the evacuation issues that require the development of new logistic methods. The joint work of the Franco-German consortium will focus on the real expectations of end users (public institution in collaboration with the civil security) involved in the project and who will monitor the applicability of the proposed tools with realistic scenarios. The city of Nice will be the test-city because it is subject to a risk of earthquake and tsunami.

The methodological approach that we advocate is based on modeling, optimization and simulation with an emphasis on multicriteria decision support. We pay particular attention to the need to introduce estimators to measure human behavior in crisis situations, especially to validate by simulation the feasibility in practice of the evacuation plans previously calculated by optimization.

The goal of our project is to establish an ergonomic decision support system.

This project is funded by the National Research Agency and  the Bundesministerium für Bildung und Forschung (Federal Ministry of Education and Research).

More information here.