Abstract: In times of disaster, or other emergency situations, it is critical for people to be evacuated in a smooth manner. However, people often tend to panic when faced with disaster, crowding the evacuation passageways of buildings in the event of fire and congesting roads with cars containing people fleeing from predicted hurricanes. In such situations, an evacuation guidance system might ...

With the frequent occurrence of major emergencies, emergency management gets high attention from all around the world. This paper investigates the comprehensive optimization of major emergency evacuation route and departure time, in which case the evacuation propagation mechanism is considered under traffic control. Given the practical assumptions, we first establish a comprehensive optimizatio...

Pet ownership has historically been one of the biggest risk factors for evacuation failure prior to natural disasters. The forced abandonment of pets during Hurricane Katrina in 2005 made national headlines and led to the passage of the Pet Evacuation and Transportation Standards Act (PETS, 2006) which mandated local authorities to plan for companion animal evacuation. Hurricane Irene hit the E...

We investigate the problem of creating fast evacuation plans for buildings that are modeled as grid polygons, possibly containing exponentially many cells. We study this problem in two contexts: the “confluent” context in which the routes to exits remain fixed over time, and the “non-confluent” context in which routes may change. Confluent evacuation plans are simpler to carry out, as they allo...

This article reviews the literature describing four chemical and nuclear accidents and the lessons learned from each regarding the evacuation of civilian populations. Evacuation may save lives however, if poorly orchestrated, it may cause serious problems. For example, an inaccurate assessment of danger may lead to the evacuation of the same population twice, as the area requiring evacuation be...

| Planning and design of evacuation networks is both a complex and critically important optimization problem for a number of emergency situations. One particularly critical class of examples concerns the emergency evacuation of chemical plants, high-rise buildings, and naval vessels due to re, explosion or other emergencies. The problem is compounded because the solution must take into account ...

The simulation model of evacuation behavior from tsunami is constructed utilizing Multi-Agent-System in this study. The validity of the simulation model is verified by applying it to the case of Aonae, Okushiri Island during the Southwest-off Hokkaido Earthquake of 1993. And results of some case studies for winter earthquake show that snow conditions affect evacuation behavior greatly, and that...

The buildings, working personnel, and patients and their relatives may directly or indirectly be affected by the disasters. Here we will discuss evacuation, establishing a field hospital, communication, the role of the media in disasters, and defending against sabotage. The affected individuals should be evacuated and transferred to secure zones safely and rapidly. How the decision for evacuati...

We propose a static uncapacitated multi-commodity flow model along with a time-based scheduling tool for solving evacuation scheduling problems with capacity constraints. The paper addresses the problem of modeling evacuation scheduling out of an affected area, there are a pre-defined set of exit points out of the target affected area and a set of source points for the evacuees. The proposed ap...

Conventional emergency evacuation plans often assign evacuees to fixed routes or destinations based mainly on geographic proximity. Such approaches can be inefficient if the roads are congested, blocked, or otherwise dangerous because of the emergency. By not constraining evacuees to prespecified destinations, a one-destination evacuation approach provides flexibility in the optimization proces...