Geographical risk analysis based path selection for automatic, speedy, and reliable evacuation guiding using evacuees’ mobile devices

It has been highly expected to achieve speedy and reliable evacuation guiding under large scale disasters. As for the speedy evacuation, an automatic evacuation guiding scheme has been proposed, which is a reactive approach based on implicit interactions among evacuees, their mobile devices, and networks. In this scheme, an evacuation route is given by the shortest path, which may not be safe. In this paper, we propose a speedy and reliable path selection based on the geographical risk map for the existing automatic evacuation guiding, which is a proactive approach that allows evacuees to evacuate speedily while avoiding encounters with blocked road segments as much as possible. First, the proposed scheme enumerates candidates of short paths from the evacuee’s current location to the refuge. Then, it selects the most reliable one from the candidates by taking into account road blockage probabilities, each of which is an estimated probability that the corresponding road is blocked under a certain disaster. Through simulation experiments, we show that the proposed scheme can improve the safety of evacuation in terms of the number of encounters with blocked road segments while keeping both the average and maximum evacuation times unchanged, compared with the shortest path selection. We further demonstrate how the proactive function, i.e., geographical risk analysis, and the reactive function, i.e., information sharing, contribute to the system performance.