Effects of Data Resolution and Human Behavior on Large Scale Evacuation Simulations

(Original signatures are on file with official student records.) iii This dissertation is dedicated to my very supportive mother Yin Xu for her selfless love. iv ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS First, I would like to express my deepest gratitude to my academic advisor, Dr. Lee D. Han, for his mentorship during my PhD study. He really cares about my research interests and provides a lot of great ideas for my research projects. The dissertation would not exist without the inspiring conversations with him. Also, I would like to thank Dr. Cheng Liu for his selfless help with the technical details in my research. Since June 2012, he has been my mentor in Oak Ridge National Laboratory. He provides many programs which boost my research to generate promising results in my academic papers. computational science. I am so grateful to have them on my committee and collaborate with them on research and publishing papers. on. They make my life in Knoxville more colorful. v ABSTRACT Traffic Analysis Zones (TAZ) based macroscopic simulation studies are mostly applied in evacuation planning and operation areas. The large size in TAZ and aggregated information of macroscopic simulation underestimate the real evacuation performance. To take advantage of the high resolution demographic data LandScan USA (the zone size is much smaller than TAZ) and agent-based microscopic traffic simulation models, many new problems appeared and novel solutions are needed. A series of studies are conducted using LandScan USA Population Cells (LPC) data for evacuation assignments with different network configurations, travel demand models, and travelers' compliance behavior. First, a new Multiple-Source-Nearest-Destination Shortest Path (MSNDSP) problem is defined for generating Origin-Destination (OD) matrix in evacuation assignments when using LandScan dataset. A new Super Node based Trip Generator (SNTG) algorithm is developed to significantly improve the computational performance in generating OD pairs. Second, a new agent-based traffic assignment framework using LandScan and TRANSIMS modules is proposed for evacuation planning and operation study. Impact analysis on traffic analysis area resolutions (TAZ vs. LPC), evacuation start times (daytime vs. nighttime), and departure time choice models (normal S-shape model vs. location based model) are studied. Third, based on the proposed framework, multi-scale network configurations (two levels of road networks and two scales of zone sizes) and three routing schemes (shortest network distance, highway biased, and shortest straight-line distance routes) are implemented for the evacuation performance comparison studies. Fourth, to study the impact of human behavior under evacuation …