Rain and flood informed vehicle routing problem

This article presents a method for obtaining routes that avoid rain and floods in a city. To achieve this, we model a city’s road network as a weighted multigraph and use reliable data on precipitation and flood occurrences. We employ well-known methods to solve the shortest path problem based on this data. To exemplify and validate the method presented in this article, we study cases in Sao Paulo in the Summer of 2019. For this purpose, we use rainfall prediction data from radar and flooding records confirmed by Sao Paulo's Climate Emergency Management Center. This information is employed to modify the weights of the edges (streets) of the multigraph. This modification shows that the shortest paths between the chosen points avoid rain and floods.