A Novel Approach to Evacuation Route Planning

Shashi Shekhar Qingsong Lu, and Sangho Kim AHPCRC-UM The goal of evacuation route planning is to identify routes that canbe used to minimize the time required to move vulnerable populations to safe destinations. Evacuation route planning is a key component of effective disaster emergency management and homeland defense preparation. As such, it is an important challenge facing the U.S. Army, which must be ready and able to assist in large-scale evacuations of civilians. Since evacuation planning is computation intensive, high performance computing is essential to meeting this challenge. Also, real-time solutions are needed to support evaluation of alternative scenarios (e.g. weatheq change in transportation networks, or number of evacuees). Traditional warning systems convey only the threat descriptions and the need for evacuation to the affected population. Such systems do not consider capacity constraints of the transportation networkand, as a result, have proved inadequate during actual evacuation events. When Hurricane Andrew was approaching Florida in 1992, evacuation announcements led to tremendous traffic congestion, general confusion, and chaos. In very recent times, when Hurricane Rita approached Houston, evacuations resulted in congestion on Texas highways for tens of miles as seen in Fisure 1.