Exit-Point Based Approaches for Real-Time Traffic Evacuation Management

Abstract

Real-time traffic evacuation management has become an increasingly attractive research topic, as a result of the rapid development and wide spread deployment of a large number of applications for traffic data collection, processing and dissemination. In this paper we extend our existing work on developing a smart traffic evacuation management system (STEMS) by enhancing it with new evacuation algorithms. These new algorithms facilitate a safer and more efficient evacuation for the general public in case of natural or human-caused disasters. STEMS mitigates the unexpected aspect of unpredictable disasters by dynamically generating evacuation plans when given the scope and location of an incident. The proposed evacuation algorithms leverage real-time traffic information to route traffic efficiently towards the closest evacuation exit points and out of the disaster areas. The advantage of these exit-point centered approaches is that their performance is not affected by the street network topology. We present simulation studies showing the improvement, in terms of evacuation effectiveness, of the proposed algorithms over the existing ones