Potential evacuees without access to personal automobiles are expected to utilize transit,especially buses, to reach safer regions. For a transit agency, operation problems to beconsidered include establishing bus launch areas, positioning the minimum number ofrequired buses and, coordination of transit operators, especially addressing the questionof whether the number of drivers will be sufficient to cover the number of vehicles (i.e.buses) planned to be used during the evacuation. It is also highly probable that during anemergency, absenteeism rates for the bus drivers might increase. In this study, wedevelop two stochastic models to determine extra driver needs during an emergencyevacuation operation and to provide optimal solutions using well-established concepts inmathematical programming. First we reviewed the existing literature needed to developan effective methodology for the development of optimal extraboard managementstrategies and found out that although several recent reports clearly mention the problemof not having sufficient number of bus drivers during emergency evacuation operations(5, 7), there is no analytical study that incorporates the optimal extraboard size probleminto emergency evacuation operations. Second, two mathematical models are presented inthis report. The aim of the developed models is to fill the gap in the literature fordetermining optimal extraboard size for transit operations during emergency evacuations.Our models are specifically designed to capture risk-averse behavior of decision makers.Finally, these models are tested using hypothetical examples based on real-world dataextracted from New Jersey. Results show that both models give reasonable extraboardsize estimates and under different conditions these models are responsive to the changesin cost and quality of service preferences. The results are encouraging in terms of themodels’ usefulness for real-world applications.
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