Studies of Emergency Evacuation Strategies based on Kinematic Wave Models of Network Vehicular Traffic

How to efficiently control traffic during emergency evacuation is an important research issue. An emergency evacuation strategy, one of the main control strategies, aims to identify the best routing strategy so as to fully utilize the available capacity of a transportation network. In this study, we model the evacuation traffic with a kinematic wave model of network vehicular traffic. We present two evacuation route guidance strategies: one is to maximize the total number of vehicles evacuated from the origin zone during a period of time, and the other is a myopic strategy based on local traffic supplies of downstream links at an intersection. The first strategy is an offline strategy and can be solved by a genetic algorithm, while the second one can be solved online. The performances of the proposed methods are tested with a simple road network.