Evacuation Routes Optimization with Effects of Traffic Light at Intersections

Abstract

Intersection is the fundamental unit of urban traffic network. Thus the delay caused by traffic light at intersection is non-ignorable when regarding the evacuation routes. Because an intersection with traffic light consists of a repeated sequence of time windows with designated duration, different starting time of evacuation corresponds to different intersection delay and evacuation routes. Considering the intersection delay and capacity, superior evacuation routes and the flow assigned to each route are obtained by adopting the compound labeling algorithm to find the minimum cost flow of the traffic network. In the numerical example, evacuation routes with different starting time are compared, which indicates that the proposed method can get a good result with consideration of evacuation time and route optimization.