Disasters like floods, hurricanes, chemical or nuclear accidents may
cause the necessity to evacuate the affected area. The evacuation of the
urban area needs to be planned carefully. One issue is the
reorganization of the traffic routing. Congested urban areas have
usually complex street networks that are composed of many intersections
with streets connecting them. The population density of a congested
urban area is usually high and the street network is already used to
capacity during rush hour traffic. The considered problem of this work
is the reorganization of the traffic routing of an urban area for the
case of an emergency mass evacuation. Especially aspects of the
evacuation like safety, avoidance of delays and the total system travel
time are taken into account. Combinatorial and graph theoretical aspects
are adapted for the evacuation problem and highlight issues concerning
especially conflicts within intersections. This work gives an extensive
summary of literature of evacuation of urban areas. Mixed-integer linear
programming models are developed for evacuation problems and heuristic
algorithms are provided and tested.?