Method of Searching for Earthquake Disaster Evacuation Routes Using Multi-Objective GA and GIS

Yuichiro Shimura, Kayoko Yamamoto

Graduate School of Information Systems, University of Electro-Communications, Tokyo, Japan.

DOI: 10.4236/jgis.2014.65042                

Abstract

This study treats the determination of routes for evacuation on foot in earthquake disasters as a multi-objective optimization problem, and aims to propose a method for quantitatively searching for evacuation routes using a multi-objective genetic algorithm (multi-objective GA) and GIS. The conclusions can be summarized in the following three points. 1) A GA was used to design and create an evacuation route search algorithm which solves the problem of the optimization of earthquake disaster evacuation routes by treating it as an optimization problem with multiple objectives, such as evacuation distance and evacuation time. 2) In this method, goodness of fit is set by using a Pareto ranking method to determine the ranking of individuals based on their relative superiorities and inferiorities. 3) In this method, searching for evacuation routes based on the information on present conditions allows evacuation routes to be derived based on present building and road locations. Further, this method is based on publicly available information; therefore, obtaining geographic information similar to that of this study enables this method to be effective regardless of what region it is applied to, or whether the data regards the past or the future. Therefore, this method has high degree of spatial and temporal reproducibility.

Keywords

Evacuation Route, Evacuation Site, Earthquake Disaster, Multi-Objective Optimization Problem, Multi-Objective GA (Multi-Objective Genetic Algorithm), Pareto Ranking Method, GIS

Conflicts of Interest

The authors declare no conflicts of interest.

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