Bus Routing for emergency evacuations: The case of the Great Fire of Valparaiso

The Bus Evacuation Problem is a route planning problem, in the context of an evacuation in an emergency situation. Considering that public transport is available to support the evacuation, the objective of the problem is to determine the best route for each vehicle, to move all the people from a risk zone to open shelters located in safe zones, such that the evacuation time is minimized. In this work we present a method based on the Greedy Randomized Adaptive Search Procedure metaheuristic to solve the problem, in order to apply the solution to a real-world scenario based on a recent wildfire on Valparaíso, Chile. In computational experiments we demonstrate that our approach is effective to solve real-world size problems, and able to outperform a commercial MIP solver.