Just before a hurricane is predicted to strike an urban area, millions of people evacuate from impact zones to safer regions. This paper provides a mass-evacuation strategy using public transportation before the strike of a hurricane. The assumptions made are that the evacuation zones, shelter locations, and the time of strike of the hurricane are pre-determined. The evacuation operations comme...

Experiences with evacuation route planning algorithms Shashi Shekhar a , KwangSoo Yang a , Venkata M.V. Gunturi a , Lydia Manikonda a , Dev Oliver a , Xun Zhou a , Betsy George b , Sangho Kim c , Jeffrey M.R. Wolff a & Qingsong Lu a a Department of Computer Science and Engineering University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, MN, USA b Oracle, Nashua, NH, USA c Geodatabase Team, Environment System Rese...

The open government initiatives have provided tremendous data resources for the transportation system and emergency services in urban areas. This paper proposes a traffic simulation framework using high temporal resolution demographic data and real time open government data for evacuation planning and operation. A comparison study using real-world data in Seattle, Washington is conducted to eva...

We describe a reactive replanning technique developed to enable transportation planning in a highly dynamic, complex and critical domain: the military aeromedical evacuation of patients to medical treatment facilities. In early 1993, the Department of Defense tasked the U.S. Transportation Command (USTRANSCOM) to consolidate the command and control of medical regulation (assigning patients to m...

Global warming in recent years has resulted in climate change. To cope with future climate change and natural environment changes, much of our planning and thinking needs to be adjusted. To this end, safety and rapidness of evacuation have become primary research goals. In this study, geographic information and fuzzy expert systems are applied to debris flow evacuation sites in Ershui Township,...

Hospital evacuations that occur during, or as a result of, infrastructure outages are complicated and demanding. Loss of infrastructure services can initiate a chain of events with corresponding management challenges. This report describes a modeling case study of the 2001 evacuation of the Memorial Hermann Hospital in Houston, Texas (USA). The study uses a model designed to track such cascadin...

Evacuation planning is a critical aspect of disaster preparedness and response to minimize the number of people exposed to a threat. Controlled evacuations aim at managing the flow of evacuees as efficiently as possible and have been shown to produce significant benefits compared to self-evacuations. However, existing approaches do not capture the delays introduced by diverging and crossing eva...

In recent years, crowded stampede incidents have occurred frequently, resulting in more and serious losses. The common cause of such is that when large-scale populations gather a limited area, the population highly unstable. emergency situations, only crowd reaches safe exit as soon possible within evacuation time to complete can loss casualties be effectively reduced. Therefore, safety managem...

This paper describes the design of computer agents that can collaborate with humans in planning. It includes an explicit problem solving level that mediates between the human-computer interaction and the underlying automated plan reasoners. We also describe a plan reasoning system that allows for incremental, interactive development of plans to support collaborative planning. This model has bee...