Authors: Yue Liu, Gang-Len Chang, Ying Liu and Xiaorong Lai
Conference: 2008 TRB Annual Meeting
Status: Accepted for Presentation
Abstract:
Evacuating large municipal areas during emergencies and disasters in an efficient manner is one of the critical tasks of emergency management agencies. This paper presents a corridor-based emergency evacuation system and its example applications for the Washington D.C. metropolitan area. The proposed system features its flexibility in accounting for various critical issues associated with both planning and real-time operations, including multiple data source integration, network decomposition, network-level traffic routing, contra-flow design, staged evacuation, optimal signal timing, and incorporating pedestrian and bus operations. Under a hypothetical emergency scenario for Union Station, the proposed system has demonstrated its effectiveness for producing evacuation routing strategies, identifying potential bottlenecks, and evaluating the performance of evacuation operations.
