Best of Both Worlds: Combining Demand and Simulation Models for Hurricane Evacuation

The past ten years have seen a marked increase in the use of simulation for evacuation planning and development of strategies. A need for flexible plans has been recognized due to the unpredictability of hurricane direction, strength and also certain behavioral variables that play into the evacuation decision regarding departure times and the destination. Traditionally, evacuation plans that have been based on characteristics observed during previous hurricanes. To develop flexible and robust evacuation plans there is a need to incorporate evacuation behavior models that can generate evacuation demand based on various storm features. This paper seeks to provide a bridge between the years of research conducted in evacuation demand modeling and traffic simulation. A sequential logit model that predicts hurricane evacuation demand and a logit model that predicts evacuation destination choice were both utilized in this study to generate an evacuation demand that was simulated using the TRANSIMS computer software package. The results indicate that the proposed methodology is able to predict fairly accurately the evacuation traffic observed during a Hurricane Katrina case study. Furthermore, this methodology has the potential to be utilized to predict evacuation operations under different storm scenarios and evacuation orders