Agent-based Modeling for Evacuation Traffic Analysis in Megaregion Road Networks

Abstract

Numerous recent catastrophic disasters have underscored the need to better plan and manage regional traffic associated with mass evacuations. Over the past three decades, traffic simulation has been applied to evaluate traffic management options and to forecast regional traffic patterns associated with evacuations. As the level of sophistication of simulation systems has increased, so have expectations for ever more detailed assessments of larger and more complex road networks, especially for evacuations. Historically, traffic modeling has required a fundamental trade-off between wide area analyses with low resolution or high resolution analyses over comparatively small areas. Recent advancements in agent-based traffic modeling, however, now permit very large areas to be simulated at high resolution. In this paper, results from a series of projects in which the TRANSIMS agent- based traffic simulation system was applied to assess and evaluate traffic conditions associated with various threat conditions and the regional traffic management approaches are summarized. These findings are valuable to enhance the understanding of the mass emergency movement of traffic and can be applied more-practically for wide-scale, regional, and even multi-state evacuation planning.