Evacuating metro passengers via the urban bus system under uncertain disruption recovery time and heterogeneous risk-taking behaviour

Abstract The bus-bridging service has always faced problems in severe emergencies or catastrophes that require the large-scale evacuation of passengers. This paper provides an alternative evacuation scheme which uses the urban bus network in the case of common metro service disruptions; this is modeled by minimizing the total cost of the affected metro passengers, through jointly selecting the bus lines and frequencies. The uncertain recovery time of the service disruption and the heterogeneous risk-taking behavior of the affected metro passengers are incorporated in the scheme. Therefore, we build a linkage between the evacuation service design and the risk-taking behavior of passengers. A heuristic algorithm is proposed to calculate the optimal evacuation scheme. A numerical experiment using a real-world network is conducted to illustrate the validity of the model and algorithm.