History has shown that evacuation planning has been based largely on lessons learned from prior events. While it yields incremental improvements, this approach also results in plans that tend to address failures ‘of past evacuations’, while leaving vulnerabilities to unforeseen conditions. Traffic simulation is a tool that can be used to evaluate evacuation plans and test contingencies not yet ...

Simulation of evacuation plans is a relatively complex problem. It is necessary to simulate a number of separate processes which interact in the result. Namely, they are pedestrian-pedestrian interactions, pedestrian-static object (e.g. wall) interactions and pedestrian-environment (fire, smoke, etc.) interactions. In this case, the evacuation simulation is controled on the microscopic level. M...

In creating an evacuation simulation for training and planning, realistic agents that reproduce known phenomenon are required. Evacuation simulation in the airport domain requires additional features beyond most simulations, including the unique behaviors of firsttime visitors who have incomplete knowledge of the area and families that do not necessarily adhere to often-assumed pedestrian behav...

Evacuations are a critical aspect of disaster management, and generally the first prevention measure to ensure the safety of the population under threat. Designing evacuation plans is a complex task that requires to take into account multiple factors in order to limit congestion and ensure that all evacuees reach safety in time. This paper proposes a conflict-based path-generation algorithm for...

We present a capacity constrained network flow optimization approach for finding evacuation paths, flows and schedules so as to maximize the total evacuees for short notice evacuation planning (SNEP). Due to dynamic nature of this optimization problem, we first construct a time-expanded network that expands the static network over the planning horizon for every time interval. Since the resultin...

Residential development in fire-prone wildlands is occurring at an unprecedented rate. Community-based evacuation planning in many areas is an emerging need. In this paper we present a method for using microscopic traffic simulation to develop and test neighborhood evacuation plans in the urban ^wildland interface. The method allows an analyst to map the subneighborhood variation in household e...

Title of Thesis: TRAFFIC SIGNAL TIMING FOR URBAN EVACUATION Ming Chen, Master of Science, 2005 Directed By: Dr. Elise Miller-Hooks Department of Civil Engineering Significant effort has been expended to reduce the evacuation time in a geographic evacuation. The majority of these efforts have focused on freeways and it appears that there has been no systematic consideration of signal timing in e...

Disaster and evacuation planning crucially depend on good routing strategies. This article compares two di erent routing strategies in a multi-agent simulation of a large real world evacuation scenario. The rst approach approximates a Nash equilibrium where every evacuee adopts an individually optimal routing strategy regardless of what this solution imposes on others. The second approach appro...