Development of a Large-Scale Traffic Simulation Model for Hurricane Evacuation of Mississippi Coastal Region, (August 2014 to August 2015).

摘要

The project demonstrates the effectiveness of using a gate control strategy for traffic management in an emergency evacuation when people within a localized Protective Action Zone (PAZ) must be evacuated with a short notice. Selected nodes on the PAZ boundary with access and volume capacities could be treated as gates for evacuation traffic to be guided through with a higher priority over traffic using the non?gate nodes. In the study, an optimization process is sought to minimize the total travel cost of the evacuation trips with a gate control strategy while traffic constraints and network equilibriums are considered. The effectiveness of the model is first tested by the computation results drawn from an assumed evacuation network. The computation results show that the gate control strategy could improve the performance of an evacuation by reducing the numbers of conflicts in trip routes and traffic movements. Then, the model is tested in a case study of a real evacuation network in the Mississippi Gulf Coast region with nodes and links in several counties, respectively. The experimental study results show that the gate control strategy could achieve an effective evacuation operation and improve the performance of the evacuation by reducing average travel time in trip routes and conflicting traffic movements compared with a non?gate situation where evacuation trips are conducted based on “shortest paths” without a gate control strategy.