Does Non-Compliance with Route/Destination Assignment Compromise Evacuation Efficiency?

Conference · Mon Jan 01 04:00:00 EST 2007

OSTI ID:969654

Yuan, Fang ^[1]; Han, Lee ^[1]; Chin, Shih-Miao ^[2]; Hwang, Ho-Ling ^[2]

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1. University of Tennessee, Knoxville (UTK)
2. ORNL

This paper documents studies of two real-world network evacuation cases, each with a different, but proven, simulation software package. The purpose of these studies was to examine whether the rate of evacuees' compliance with predetermined route/destination assignments would have an impact on the efficiency of evacuation operations. Results from both cases suggest that a rate of less than 100% compliance does not compromise evacuation efficiency. In fact, although this is counter-intuitive, evacuation efficiency would actually improve as a result of "sensible" non-compliance on the part of the evacuees. A closer observation of the results revealed that the somewhat unexpected improvement results from a reduction in congestion along designated evacuation routes as evacuees spread out to less prominent parallel streets and other non-congested outbound routes. This suggests that by being limited by the zone-to-zone and one-to-one assignment framework, conventional evacuation plans may have fallen short of providing the most efficient guidance to evacuees. To address this issue, some systematic means, perhaps simulation-based, should be performed to assess the zone partitions, route designations, and destination assignments in existing evacuation plans. Thus, evacuation planning with route/destination assignments based on origin zones may be flawed and may deserve reconsideration. After all, once en route, where an evacuee is coming from is of far less consequence than where he or she is going.

• Research Organization: Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL)
• Sponsoring Organization: ME USDOE - Office of Management, Budget, and Evaluation; ORNL work for others
• DOE Contract Number: AC05-00OR22725
• OSTI ID: 969654
• Country of Publication: United States
• Language: English

Related Subjects

29 ENERGY PLANNING, POLICY, AND ECONOMY
COMPLIANCE
COMPUTERIZED SIMULATION
EFFICIENCY
EMERGENCY PLANS
EVACUATION
Emergency evacuation
HUMAN FACTORS
TRAFFIC CONTROL
enforcement and compliance
network simulation
traffic assignment
traffic management