An intelligent disaster management system based evacuation strategies

The increasing urgent need of emergency response systems cannot be underestimated due to the many manmade and natural disasters in recent years, such as the recent Philippines storm, Typhoon Haiyan 2013, and September 2001 attacks. The transportation and telecommunication systems have witnessed a great improvement throughout the last decades. In our previous works, we proposed and evaluated an intelligent disaster management system based on emerging ICT (Information and Communication Technologies) technologies with a focus on transportation environments; the proposed system used Vehicular Ad hoc Network and Cloud computing technologies. Given this trend, in this paper, we investigate the potential of the proposed system to improve the transportation evacuation strategies. We develop a tool to facilitate the use of Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS) measures in simulated evacuations. An increase in the possibility of saving lives and properties has been noticed when modelling the impact of a disaster on a city data based on applying evacuation strategy plan such as Demand Strategy (DS). Substantial benefits in terms of improved and balanced traffic flow are achieved.