Intelligent Shelter Allotment for Emergency Evacuation Planning: A Case Study of Makkah

Given maps of an evacuee population, shelter destinations and a transportation network, the goal of intelligent shelter allotment (ISA) is to assign routes, exits and shelters to evacuees for quick and safe evacuation. ISA is important due to emergency planning and response applications. ISA is challenging due to movement conflict and transportation-network choke-points. State of the practice based on Nearest Exit or Shelter (NES) paradigm and computational approaches such as capacity constrained route planning (CCRP), have shortcomings in meeting these challenges. We propose a novel approach, namely, Crowd-separated Allocation of Routes, Exits and Shelters (CARES) based on the idea of spatial anomaly avoidance. Experiments and Hajj case study (in Makkah) show that CARES meets both challenges by providing faster evacuation than NES and much lesser evacuee-group movement-conflicts than CCRP.