A Mobile Computing Approach to Automatic Traffic Evacuation Management

In this paper we first introduce our smart traffic evacuation management system (STEMS), an ITS system in development to quickly and efficiently generate dynamic evacuation plans facilitating the rapid evacuation of a city street network in response to a human-induced disaster. We then broaden STEMS to a 2-tier architecture designed to interact with mobile devices. When incidents occur, STEMS automatically generates an evacuation plan, and prioritizes the deployment of personnel to direct traffic at street intersections by utilizing a voting algorithm and heuristics. Through the use of mobile communication devices the system subsequently coordinates these personnel in directing the evacuation traffic in real time. Our simulation results indicate that STEMS, with the new mobile computing capability, is very effective in mitigating the impacts of the disaster. The benefit can be observed immediately even during an initial response when only a small subset of the intersections can be policed and coordinated before more personnel can arrive at the scene