Issue: 2026/Vol.36/No.3, Pages
A FACILITY-INTEGRATED FLOW INCREMENT PROBLEM FOR EMERGENCY EVACUATION UNDER BUDGET CONSTRAINTS
Ram Chandra Dhungana
, Shiva Prakash Gupta , Iswar Mani Adhikari
This is not yet the definitive version of the paper. This version will undergo additional copyediting, typesetting and review before it is published in its final form, but we are providing this version to give early visibility of the article.
Cite as: R. C. Dhungana, S. P. Gupta, I. M. Adhikari. A facility-integrated flow increment problem for emergency evacuation under budget constraints. Operations Research and Decisions 2026: 36(3). DOI 10.37190/ord/218948
Abstract
The designing of evacuation strategies is the process of making decisions concerning to the objectives that are multiple and, in most cases, conflicting to each other. This research work demonstrates a comprehensive framework of evacuation optimization that integrates multi-objective network flow concepts. The model put forward is the one that determines in a joint manner the most advantageous locations of the facilities as well as the flow assignments to realize not only the evacuation that is efficient but also balanced. To elevate network performance, a cost-aware contraflow strategy is presented which, by considering the switching and traffic management costs, along with the increasing capacity, reverses the arcs that are unused. The inclusion of these genuine constraints in the model provides a means to evaluate the compromises that exist between efficiency, cost, and the feasibility of operations during disaster response.
Keywords: network flow, facility placement, flow maximization, resource limitation, reversal cost
Received: 1 December 2025 Accepted: 6 March 2026
Published online: 7 March 2026