The recent loss of lives and traffic jams (Figure 1) for tens of miles as hurricanes Rita and Katrina approached the Gulf coast demonstrate the enormous difficulty in evacuating urban areas [6]. Besides hurricanes, evacuation may be necessary due to other potential disasters, e.g., fire, terrorism, and nuclear or chemical plant accidents. Thus, the local emergency management community engages i...

Analysis of public behavior plays an important role in crisis management, disaster response, and evacuation planning. Unfortunately, collecting relevant data can be costly and finding meaningful information for analysis is challenging. A growing number of Location-based Social Network services provides time-stamped, geo-located data that opens new opportunities and solutions to a wide range of ...

BACKGROUND In Bangladesh, abortion is restricted except to save the life of a woman, but menstrual regulation is allowed to induce menstruation and return to non-pregnancy after a missed period. MR services are typically provided through the Directorate General of Family Planning, while postabortion care services for incomplete abortion are provided by facilities under the Directorate General o...

In recent years, catastrophic disasters by massive earthquakes are increasing in the world, and disaster management is required more than ever. In the case of disasters such as tsunami from which the slight delay of evacuation deprives of life. In this article, we formalize the emergency evacuation planning model for the evacuation from tsunami etc. based on the idea of the universally quickest...

Our work is intended to model and solve artificial planning problems with logic based planning, using the novel semantics called p-stable, which is an alternative of stable semantics. Also we present a method to encode a general planning problem and then we present an example, which is the blocks world problem. This can be applied in a variety of tasks including robotics, process planning, upda...

We use visual analytics to assist human experts in the verification of evacuation schedules and enable them to identify the bottle-necks in building evacuation. The user can change parameters, such as the number of occupants present in the rooms, the parametric settings for fire simulation, the building design, etc. and analyze their effect on evacuation. Visualization of the people flow in the...

Disastrous situations, either naturally (such as fires, earthquake, rising tides, hurricane) or man-made (such as terrorist bombings, chemical spills, and so on), have claimed the lives of thousands. As such, optimizing the evacuation operations during an emergency situation would require an effective crowd evacuation plan, which is acknowledged to be one of the vital studies of the societal re...

Hurricanes Katrina and Rita resulted in massive devastation of the Gulf Coast at Mississippi, Louisiana, and Texas during 2005. Because of those disasters, dialysis providers, nephrologists, and dialysis patients used disaster planning activities to work to mitigate the morbidity and mortality associated with the 2005 hurricane season for future events affecting dialysis patients. As Hurricane ...

Efficient tools are needed to identify routes and schedules to evacuate affected populations to safety in face of natural disasters or terrorist attacks. Challenges arise due to violation of key assumptions (e.g. stationary ranking of alternative routes, Wardrop equilibrium) behind popular shortest path algorithms (e.g. Dijkstra’s, A*) and microscopic traffic simulators (e.g. DYNASMART). Time-e...

Without successful large-scale regional evacuations, threats such as hurricanes and wild-fires can cause a large loss of life. In this context, automobiles are oftentimes an essential transportation mode for evacuations, but the ensuing traffic typically overwhelms the roadway capacity and causes congestion on a massive scale. Congestion leads to many problems including longer, costlier, and mo...