A person with impaired mobility is one of the most vulnerable in emergencies. During an evacuation, the mobility-impaired need special arrangements while being transported to shelters and special accommodations during their shelter stays. When resources are limited, not all shelters can be specially equipped for low-mobility evacuees. The problem of simultaneously choosing a particular subset of shelters to equip, matching persons with impaired mobility to these shelters, and routing paratransit vehicles to bring passengers to shelters accordingly is addressed. The problem is formulated as a mixed-integer program, and a heuristic appropriate for solving real-world, large-scale instances is proposed. These solution strategies can form the basis of a practical tool to be used for evacuation planning. An evacuation scenario is constructed based on the basis of real-world evacuation zones, shelter locations, and population statistics for New York City, and this scenario is used to evaluate the heuristic.
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