Optimal traffic management to ensure emergency evacuation compliance

In case of an emergency, traffic management is often applied to ensure safe and efficient evacuation. In this paper, we study how traffic management - together with an evacuation plan on instructed departure time windows and dedicated routes - can be optimally deployed to increase travelers' compliance (towards this plan), thereby improving the evacuation efficiency. To this end, a framework is proposed integrating a macroscopic traffic simulator, including an description of travelers' compliance behavior, and a optimization method based on Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO) for strategic decisions on the deployment of traffic management under uncertain budget constraints. The model-predictive optimization framework is presented, after which it is illustrated on a case study. The numerical results from this case study show the relationship between (optimal) evacuation plans and optimal compliance levels by traffic management. Hence these findings allow for more detailed analysis leading to generic rules for optimal deployment of traffic management in case of emergency evacuation.