Evacuation-Route Recommendation Using DTN with Evacuee Attributes in Disasters

Abstract

Information on evacuation shelters and routes is important for evacuees to evacuate safely and promptly when a disaster occurs. To take appropriate evacuation routes, evacuees need to gather information on roads that are damaged. However, in large-scale disasters, network infrastructure can be damaged and become unusable in many cases. To solve this problem, some existing studies propose providing evacuation routes by collecting road information from mobile terminals of evacuees by using a delay tolerant network (DTN) without using network infrastructure. However, in the existing works, congestion caused by evacuees concentrating on a specific route is a problem. This congestion is caused by identical evacuation routes being presented to all evacuees. Therefore, in this paper, we propose recommending different routes to evacuees on the basis of evacuee attributes (e.g. age) to alleviate congestion on roads. We numerically evaluate the proposed method by multi-agent simulation (MAS) and show that it achieves a 22% or greater reduction in the average evacuation distance and 44% or greater reduction in the average evacuation time where the number of evacuees was 30% of the daytime population.