Heuristic priority ranking of emergency evacuation staging to reduce clearance time

    Authors

    S. W. Mitchell; E. Radwan;Trb

    Comments

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    Keywords

    Engineering, Civil; Transportation Science & Technology

    Abstract

    Hazardous events, both natural and human-made, present tremendous risks to communities throughout the world. These events typically necessitate the evacuation of local or regional populations to safe destinations or shelters and have warning times ranging from minutes to hours or even days. The size and scope of these events present a challenge to the emergency management or agency personnel who must see to the health and safety of those living or working in their jurisdiction. This study evaluated various heuristic strategies to improve evacuation of an at-risk region by using a representative traffic roadway network. Finding evacuation strategies that reduce clearance time would lead to saving lives, time, and money. For the given test network, population density, or total number of trips, has an effect on overall clearance times; as densities (trips) increase, a greater potential for improved clearance time is indicated. Six different shift strategies were evaluated, each strategy based on origin-to-destination distances. For departure volumes greater than five vehicles per acre (approximately 12 vehicles per hectare), clearance times showed statistically significant improvements when departure times were shifted for groups within the network. In addition, the amount of the departure shift has an effect on clearance time.

    Journal Title

    Network Modeling 2006

    Issue/Number

    1964

    Publication Date

    1-1-2006

    Document Type

    Article

    Language

    English

    First Page

    219

    Last Page

    228

    WOS Identifier

    WOS:000245038200024

    ISSN

    0361-1981; 978-0-309-09973-8

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