Multimodal Solutions for Large Scale Evacuations Period 5 / 15 / 2008 to 12 / 31 / 2009

DISCLAIMER The contents of this report reflect the views of the authors, who are responsible for the facts and the accuracy of the information presented herein. This document is disseminated under the sponsorship of the Department of Transportation University Transportation Centers Program, in the interest of information exchange. The U.S. Government assumes no liability for the contents or use thereof. In this research, a multimodal transportation model was developed attending the needs of emergency situations , and the solutions provided by the model could be used to moderate congestion during such events. The model incorporated features such as lane reversals as they have a significant impact on the evacuation efficiency. We proposed analytical techniques to solve the model. In this project, we developed a multimodal evacuation model and we hope to apply the model for an event management at the football stadium at University of Florida. The model is used to establish optimal evacuation routes to the bimodal evacuation problem and obtain efficient loading schemes for the staged evacuation. As a future extension, we are working on acceleration of the convergence of the algorithm. In this research, we intend to establish optimal evacuation routes using multimodal transportation. The proposed solution procedure will also provide a loading scheme for the evacuation. The evacuation time obtained from the proposed techniques will be shorter than the contemporary evacuation techniques. We design analytical techniques to develop a staged evacuation procedure. Staged evacuation has empirically shown to handle congestion efficiently. Also, their impact is better realized under an emergency situation. Lane reversals will be implemented as a preprocessing step to further improve the efficiency. An integer program has been formulated to solve the lane reversal problem and it will be used to identify the lanes. We will also provide proof for polynomial time solvability of the lane reversal in maximum dynamic-flow and quickest flow problems. Multimodal flow problems are known to be NP-hard, a class of problems with no known polynomial time algorithm to solve them, making the problem under consideration quite significant. The optimization techniques currently employed could be formulated as a network flow problem, wherein the nodes of the network are the places, which could be a city or a house or a building room that are linked by the arcs, which includes roads, corridors or streets. Static demands and travel times will be considered as a simplistic assumption to make the model …