Corridor-Based Emergency Evacuation System for Washington, D.C.

The evacuation of large municipal areas in an efficient manner during emergencies and disasters is one of the critical tasks of emergency management agencies. This paper presents a corridor-based emergency evacuation system and an example application of the system for the Washington, D.C., metropolitan area. The proposed system features flexibility by accounting for various critical issues associated with both planning and real-time operations, including the integration of data from multiple sources, network decomposition, network-level traffic routing, contraflow design, staged evacuation, optimal signal timing, and the incorporation of pedestrian and bus operations. Under a hypothetical emergency scenario for Union Station in Washington, D.C., the proposed system demonstrated its effectiveness at producing evacuation routing strategies, identifying potential bottlenecks, and evaluating the performance of evacuation operations.

[1]  C. Daganzo.  THE CELL TRANSMISSION MODEL.. , 1994 .

[2]  Hong Zheng,et al.  Modeling and Solving Optimal Evacuation Destination-Route-Flow-Staging Problem for No-Notice Extreme Events , 2006 .

[3]  Gang-Len Chang,et al.  Simulation-Based Emergency Evacuation System for Ocean City, Maryland, during Hurricanes , 2005 .

[4]  Brian Wolshon,et al.  PLANNING FOR THE EVACUATION OF NEW ORLEANS , 2002 .

[5]  John Collura,et al.  IMPAROVING EMERGENCY VEHICLE TRAFFIC SIGNAL PRIORITY SYSTEM ASSESSMENT METHODOLOGIES , 2003 .

[6]  Carlos F. Daganzo,et al.  THE CELL TRANSMISSION MODEL, PART II: NETWORK TRAFFIC , 1995 .

[7]  Gang-Len Chang,et al.  ARTERIAL SIGNAL OPTIMIZATION FOR EMERGENCY EVACUATION , 2006 .

[8]  Thomas J. Cova,et al.  A network flow model for lane-based evacuation routing , 2003 .

[9]  Virginia P Sisiopiku,et al.  Regional Traffic Simulation for Emergency Preparedness , 2004 .

[10]  Hani S. Mahmassani,et al.  Optimal Scheduling of Evacuation Operations , 2006 .

[11]  F. Benjamin Zhan,et al.  Agent-based modelling and simulation of urban evacuation: relative effectiveness of simultaneous and staged evacuation strategies , 2008, J. Oper. Res. Soc..

[12]  C. Daganzo.  The Cell Transmission Model: Network Traffic , 1994 .

[13]  Elise Miller-Hooks,et al.  On Solving Quickest Time Problems in Time-Dependent, Dynamic Networks , 2004, J. Math. Model. Algorithms.

[14]  Richard L. Francis,et al.  Network models for building evacuation , 1982 .

[15]  Brian Wolshon,et al.  "One-way-out": contraflow freeway operation for hurricane evacuation , 2001 .

[16]  Hediye Tuydesʹ.  Network traffic management under disaster conditions , 2005 .

[17]  Essam Radwan,et al.  Heuristic Priority Ranking of Emergency Evacuation Staging to Reduce Clearance Time , 2006 .

[18]  Brian Wolshon,et al.  Modeling and Performance Assessment of Contraflow Evacuation Termination Points , 2005 .

[19]  Eil Kwon,et al.  Evaluation of Emergency Evacuation Strategies for Downtown Event Traffic Using a Dynamic Network Model , 2005 .

[20]  Elise Miller-Hooks,et al.  traffic signal timing for urban evacuation , 2007 .

[21]  Gang-Len Chang,et al.  Cell-Based Network Optimization Model for Staged Evacuation Planning under Emergencies: , 2006 .

[22]  Athanasios K. Ziliaskopoulos,et al.  Tabu-Based Heuristic Approach for Optimization of Network Evacuation Contraflow , 2006 .

[23]  Yi-Chang Chiu.  Traffic scheduling simulation and assignment for area-wide evacuation , 2004, Proceedings. The 7th International IEEE Conference on Intelligent Transportation Systems (IEEE Cat. No.04TH8749).