A heuristic implementation of emergency traffic evacuation in urban areas

With the acceleration of China´s urbanization, more and more unexpected disasters in big cities make a severe challenge to city emergency traffic management. Under this background, we present a heuristic implementation of urban emergency traffic evacuation in this paper. Firstly, we refer to a popular evacuation demand generation model to generate the evacuation demand. When solving the path selection problem, the heuristic search method is used. We take Dijkstra shortest path and current road condition as two parts of the evaluation function to evaluate different choices and choose the best one. To simulate the dynamic process of evacuation, we developed a position update algorithm to update the positions of traffic participants. The mathematical analysis method and computer simulation are combined to determine the final evacuation route of a traffic participant. This combination is effective since it takes advantages of both methods and avoids the shortcomings at the same time.