Weighting critical infrastructure dependencies to facilitate evacuations

Abstract

Significant work has sought to improve our understanding of critical infrastructure dependencies. Efforts have focused on the importance (weight) of the connections between infrastructures, mitigating damage, and prioritizing responses after failures. Less research has been completed to understand how critical infrastructure dependencies impact the ability to complete successful evacuations. Focusing on three critical infrastructures—transportation, communication, and energy—this study proposes and reports results of a methodology to assign weight to the value of connections between infrastructures necessary for evacuations. Establishing values to weight infrastructure linkages will identify the most vital connections relevant to evacuations. This allows planners to prioritize improvements and mitigations, as well as identify locations for deploying emergency services to facilitate a timely evacuation. A fictitious evacuation was simulated using the Real time evacuation Planning Model (RtePM). Model results show the effects of communication outages resulting in changes to evacuation response and the effects of power outages resulting in changes to roadway access that require power. The output of the model allows compilation of rankings between infrastructure connections and a better understanding of the effects critical infrastructures have on an evacuation. This methodology aids decision makers in resiliency and mitigation planning to avoid unanticipated cascading failures across dependent infrastructures that inhibit effective evacuations.