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Global Optimization of Emergency Evacuation Assignments

Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, University of Tennessee, 112 Perkins Hall, Knoxville, Tennessee 37996-2010
PTV America, Inc., 1300 N. Market Street, Suite 603, Wilmington, Delaware 19801
ORNL Center of Transportation Analysis, National Transportation Research Center, 2360 Cherahala Boulevard, Knoxville, Tennessee 37932
ORNL Center of Transportation Analysis, National Transportation Research Center, 2360 Cherahala Boulevard, Knoxville, Tennessee 37932
lhan{at}utk.edu
fyuan{at}ptvamerica.com
chins{at}ornl.gov
hwanghl{at}ornl.gov

Conventional emergency evacuation plans often assign evacuees to fixed routes or destinations based mainly on geographic proximity. Such approaches can be inefficient if the roads are congested, blocked, or otherwise dangerous because of the emergency. By not constraining evacuees to prespecified destinations, a one-destination evacuation approach provides flexibility in the optimization process. We present a framework for the simultaneous optimization of evacuation-traffic distribution and assignment. Based on the one-destination evacuation concept, we can obtain the optimal destination and route assignment by solving a one-destination traffic-assignment problem on a modified network representation. In a county-wide, large-scale evacuation case study, the one-destination model yields substantial improvement over the conventional approach, with the overall evacuation time reduced by more than 60 percent. More importantly, emergency planners can easily implement this framework by instructing evacuees to go to destinations that the one-destination optimization process selects.

Key Words: emergency planning; microscopic simulation; traffic assignment; network optimization; mass evacuation; special event operations; dynamic traffic assignment; intelligent transportation system

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