Evacuation Planning Using the Integrated System of Activity-Based Modeling and Dynamic Traffic Assignment

Abstract

The occurrence of natural disasters in the coastal regions and numerous potential events in urban regions have drawn considerable attention among transportation stakeholders. Federal, state, and local officials need to be effectively prepared to address the challenges raised by an evacuation. The focus of this research effort is to develop a tool to study the repercussions of evacuation of an entire regional transportation network recognizing the human behavior element. Neglecting these seemingly chaotic traffic flow patterns would lead to inaccurate system assessment and predictions. The influences of evacuees’ locations in the urban region at the moment of emergency alert are studied. In addition, the locations of all members of the household are identified, and household member interactions are explicitly considered. Further, the accurate times the individuals enter the network to evacuate the study region are studied; times can vary according to where the other household members are located at that time and the travel time on the network to reach those locations. To accomplish the goals, the integration framework of activity-based modeling and dynamic traffic assignment is used to study the evacuation traffic flow patterns at the time of evacuation. Specifically, the paper describes the evacuation problem, discusses the utility of deploying the integrated module of activity-based modeling and dynamic traffic assignment for evacuation planning, and outlines the challenges in integrating these two tools.