Modeling Gate Control Strategy for Traffic Management in Emergency Evacuation

Abstract

The paper demonstrates the effectiveness of using a gate control strategy for traffic management in an emergency evacuation when people within a localized Protective Action Zone (PAZ) must be evacuated with a short notice. Selected nodes on the PAZ boundary with access and volume capacities could be treated as gates for evacuation traffic to be guided through with a higher priority over traffic using the non-gate nodes. In the paper, an optimization process is sought to minimize the total travel cost of the evacuation trips with a gate control strategy while traffic constraints and networkequilibriums are considered. The effectiveness of the model is tested by the computation results drawn from an assumed evacuation network. The computation results show that the gate control strategy could improve the performance of an evacuation by reducing the numbers of conflicts in trip routes and traffic movements. Language: en