Adaptive routing and guidance approach for transportation evacuation

We propose an adaptive routing and guidance approach called Adjacent Node Score (ANS). This approach is integrated with an agent-based simulation model and avoids several common assumptions made in conventional evacuation models. ANS does not assume altruistic travelers and considers traffic interaction, variable link travel times, and their dependencies. This makes it more realistic than network flow models and stochastic routing algorithms. ANS can generate effective and good solutions at a low computational cost. It only requires local network information for routing and guidance. ANS can be easily implemented in practice. We test the ANS method on two networks and compare it with other four network routing strategies including the user-equilibrium condition, myopic, aggressive, and a naïve strategy that is based on static network information. Experimental results show that ANS can disperse highly concentrated traffic flows and reduce network clearance time compared with other methods.