Connected placement of disaster shelters in modern cities

Abstract

This paper is motivated by the fact that modern cities are surprisingly vulnerable to large-scale emergencies, such as the recent terrorist attacks on Paris that resulted in the death of 130 people. Disaster shelters are one of the most effective methods to handle large-scale emergencies. Hence, this paper establishes disaster shelters with bounded costs. The objective is to minimize the total establishment costs of disaster shelters under three constraints. The first constraint is a distance constraint, which requires that people must be assigned to disaster shelters within a certain range. The second constraint is a capacity constraint, which requires that disaster shelters must have the capacity to hold incoming people. The third constraint is a connection constraint, which requires that disaster shelters should be connected to avoid being isolated. Two bounded algorithms are proposed to efficiently establish disaster shelters. Real data-driven experiments are conducted to demonstrate the efficiency and effectiveness of the proposed algorithms.