Multi-Modal Collaborative Evacuation During Mass Gatherings via Distributional Reinforcement Learning

Abstract

Large-scale public events generate concentrated passenger demand during egress periods, often overwhelming urban transit systems. This paper proposes a multi-modal evacuation framework that coordinates in-service buses temporarily diverted from existing lines and dedicated shuttle vehicles pre-positioned at depots. The problem is formulated as a two-layer stochastic optimization under travel time uncertainty: the upper layer determines pre-event shuttle fleet sizing, while the lower layer makes real-time dispatching decisions for both modes. We propose an Uncertainty-Aware Reinforcement Learning framework with Categorical DQN (UARL-CD) that learns a robust dispatching policy through a reward function aligned with the lower-level objective, explicitly accounting for travel time uncertainty via distributional value representation and stochastic training, with an action masking mechanism enforcing operational constraints. Simulation experiments based on a realistic stadium evacuation scenario demonstrate that the proposed framework significantly outperforms deterministic optimization and rule-based strategies, achieving a 31.6% reduction in evacuation completion time and a 48.4% reduction in average passenger waiting time compared to shuttles alone, while maintaining robustness to travel time uncertainty with only 4.0% performance degradation and online decisions executed within the 2-min decision interval.