Integrating Traffic Simulation Models with Evacuation Planning System in a GIS Environment

Abstract

Emergency evacuation planning is a complex procedure that includes routing evacuees, identifying shelters and exits, and designing traffic control. The evacuation routing models are vital to the evacuation planning problem. This paper presents a study of developing an integrated emergency evacuation planning system with dynamic traffic flow model within the state-of-the-art geographical information system (GIS), namely, ArcGIS platform. The main challenge of the evacuee routing problem lies in modeling evacuation traffic flow and estimating evacuation time. Since transportation infrastructure is a limited resource both in terms of directional accessibility and capacity, it is worthy of well planning evacuation routes in advance so as to ensure a safe evacuee routing decision and efficient utilization of the involved transportation infrastructure. The objective of this study is to develop an integrated approach for modeling evacuation traffic flow and planning evacuation routes. The two major models used in the integrated system, a time-discrete traffic flow model and GIS-based traffic simulation model are discussed. The time-discrete traffic flow model is proposed and formulated as the dynamic capacitated multi-commodities flow problem. The traffic flow model produces evacuees' flows that are compatible with the evacuation travel demand and routing behaviors