Vehicle Routing for Incremental Collection of Disaster Information Along Streets

Abstract

When a large-scale disaster occurs, it is necessary for an emergency response headquarters (HQ) to promptly collect disaster damage information. We consider monitoring such information along all streets in a town by a single vehicle equipping cameras, mics, and other sensors especially when high-speed communications infrastructures are unavailable. The vehicle starts from HQ, cruises through all streets, and finally backs to HQ to bring monitored information. Note that the vehicle can return to HQ on the way to drop a partial information monitored before. In this paper, a vehicle routing problem is posed for the information collecting vehicle by considering not only collection time of the entire information but also how much ratio and how long time the information is delayed in incremental collection to HQ for an early decision and a partial response. A grid map is used as a town’s street network with three types of HQ location. Through an extensive search by leveraging Eulerian circles, we found good routes for incremental collection of disaster information. The experimental results suggest the importance of an appropriate number of returns to HQ with almost equally-sized intervals depending on the HQ location.

Supported by NICT, Japan (No. 22007) and JSPS KAKENHI Grant Number 21K17706.