Average Vehicle Occupancy Contribution Evaluation in Vehicular Disaster Management System

The importance of emergency response system has grown significantly in recent times due to the frequent manmade and natural disasters such as September 2001 and Hurricane Sandy 2012. Disaster, manmade and natural, causes great economic and human losses each year throughout the world. Transportation and Telecommunication play a crucial role in disaster response and management. Our previous work was aimed to propose and evaluate a disaster management system based on emerging ICT technologies. In this paper, we especially focus on the factors that increase the potential of our disaster management system performance, the Average Vehicle Occupancy (AVO) factor plays a high important role in the evacuation process and hence in the disaster management system; where a higher level of car occupancy means fewer trips being required for the evacuation process. Hence, the potential of reducing evacuation times by introducing the AVO is presented and evaluated. The impact of a disaster on real city data is demonstrated, and the effectiveness of AVO is evaluated, we report great benefits achieved from the adoption of our proposed system while taking the AVO factor into account, which includes reduced evacuation time, increased number of evacuated vehicle and more balanced traffic flow. KeywordsDisaster Management System; Intelligent Transportation Systems; VANETs; Cloud Computing; Average Vehicle Occupancy