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<front>
<journal-meta>
<journal-id journal-id-type="publisher">ISPRS-Archives</journal-id>
<journal-title-group>
<journal-title>The International Archives of the Photogrammetry, Remote Sensing and Spatial Information Sciences</journal-title>
<abbrev-journal-title abbrev-type="publisher">ISPRS-Archives</abbrev-journal-title>
<abbrev-journal-title abbrev-type="nlm-ta">Int. Arch. Photogramm. Remote Sens. Spatial Inf. Sci.</abbrev-journal-title>
</journal-title-group>
<issn pub-type="epub">2194-9034</issn>
<publisher><publisher-name>Copernicus Publications</publisher-name>
<publisher-loc>Göttingen, Germany</publisher-loc>
</publisher>
</journal-meta>
<article-meta>
<article-id pub-id-type="doi">10.5194/isprs-archives-XLIX-M-1-2026-41-2026</article-id>
<title-group>
<article-title>Congestion-aware Multi-agent Reinforcement Learning for Wildfire Evacuation Routing</article-title>
</title-group>
<contrib-group><contrib contrib-type="author" xlink:type="simple"><name name-style="western"><surname>Raei</surname>
<given-names>Bahareh</given-names>
</name>
<xref ref-type="aff" rid="aff1">
<sup>1</sup>
</xref>
</contrib>
<contrib contrib-type="author" xlink:type="simple"><name name-style="western"><surname>Safarzadeh</surname>
<given-names>Reza</given-names>
</name>
<xref ref-type="aff" rid="aff1">
<sup>1</sup>
</xref>
</contrib>
<contrib contrib-type="author" xlink:type="simple"><name name-style="western"><surname>Wang</surname>
<given-names>Xin</given-names>
</name>
<xref ref-type="aff" rid="aff1">
<sup>1</sup>
</xref>
</contrib>
</contrib-group><aff id="aff1">
<label>1</label>
<addr-line>Dept. of Geomatics Engineering, University of Calgary, 2500 University Dr NW, Calgary, AB T2N 1N4, Canada</addr-line>
</aff>
<pub-date pub-type="epub">
<day>02</day>
<month>07</month>
<year>2026</year>
</pub-date>
<volume>XLIX-M-1-2026</volume>
<fpage>41</fpage>
<lpage>50</lpage>
<permissions>
<copyright-statement>Copyright: &#x000a9; 2026 Bahareh Raei et al.</copyright-statement>
<copyright-year>2026</copyright-year>
<license license-type="open-access">
<license-p>This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. To view a copy of this licence, visit <ext-link ext-link-type="uri"  xlink:href="https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/">https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/</ext-link></license-p>
</license>
</permissions>
<self-uri xlink:href="https://isprs-archives.copernicus.org/articles/XLIX-M-1-2026/41/2026/isprs-archives-XLIX-M-1-2026-41-2026.html">This article is available from https://isprs-archives.copernicus.org/articles/XLIX-M-1-2026/41/2026/isprs-archives-XLIX-M-1-2026-41-2026.html</self-uri>
<self-uri xlink:href="https://isprs-archives.copernicus.org/articles/XLIX-M-1-2026/41/2026/isprs-archives-XLIX-M-1-2026-41-2026.pdf">The full text article is available as a PDF file from https://isprs-archives.copernicus.org/articles/XLIX-M-1-2026/41/2026/isprs-archives-XLIX-M-1-2026-41-2026.pdf</self-uri>
<abstract>
<p>Conventional navigation systems often cause severe bottlenecks during mass wildfire evacuations by routing vehicles onto the same capacity-limited corridors while ignoring advancing flame fronts. This paper introduces a congestion-aware multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL) framework that models each road intersection as an independent Q-learning agent to balance route efficiency with strict hazard avoidance. During deployment, a batch-sequential mechanism dynamically adjusts these learned policies using real-time traffic, inherently dispersing vehicles away from overloaded roads. Evaluated on the real-world road network and parcel data of Lytton, British Columbia, the framework reduces peak edge congestion by 74% and achieves complete fire-zone avoidance compared to conventional fastest-path algorithms. With only a 7.4% increase in mean travel distance, these results demonstrate that distributed MARL policies yield significantly safer, more balanced, and highly scalable evacuation flows.</p>
</abstract>
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</article-meta>
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