Transportation network reconfiguration for evacuation planning

Abstract:

The human beings are always under the threat of disasters. The great loss caused by disasters demand more effective emergency management approaches. Evacuation, as a critical part of disaster management, has been an area of focus both in research and in practice. One big challenge during the evacuation is the traffic jams caused by the imbalance between the demand and supply of the transportation system, which means the capacity of the transportation network is inadequate compared with the large population of evacuees.

In this work, a novel transportation network reconfiguration model that can improve evacuation efficiency will be proposed and applied to different evacuation scenarios. Four research questions will be solved. First, how to reduce the traffic demand when the total number of evacuees is fixed? Second, how to reconfigure the supply and demand of the traffic systems simultaneously? This part will propose an integrated strategy for evacuation planning; in particular, the demand is reconfigured through a heterogeneous fleet of vehicles and the traffic supply is reconfigured through a contraflow technique. Third, how to optimize the integrated reconfiguration strategy in different networks and under different objective functions. We will consider different evacuation demand as well as different objective functions. Fourth, how to evaluate the performance of the traffic systems based on evacuation scenario? We will propose a novel resilience measurement approach based on emergency levels. Finally, some managerial insights for evacuation planning will be given.