Ultra‐Scale Computing for Emergency Evacuation

Abstract

AbstractEmergency evacuations are carried out in anticipation of a disaster such as hurricane landfall or flooding, and in response to a disaster that strikes without warning. Existing emergency evacuation modeling and simulation tools are primarily designed for evacuation planning and are of limited value for evacuation management. In order to align with desktop computing, these models reduce the data and computational complexities through simple approximations to real network conditions and traffic behaviors, but these simplifications are not always representative of real‐world scenarios. With the emergence of high resolution physiographic, demographic, and socioeconomic data and a relative abundance of supercomputing platforms, it is possible to develop microsimulation‐based emergency evacuation models that incorporate human behaviors, increasingly realistic traffic assignments, and can simulate an evacuation of millions of people over a large geographic area. However, such advances in evacuation modeling and simulation demand computational capacity beyond the desktop scales, and must be supported by high performance computing platforms. This paper explores the advantages and feasibility of ultra‐scale computing for increasing the usefulness of high resolution emergency evacuation simulations.