Transportation Networks for Emergency Evacuations
- ORNL
Evacuation modeling systems (EMS) have been developed to facilitate the planning, analysis, and deployment of emergency evacuation of populations at risk. For any EMS, data such as road network maps, traffic control characteristics, and population distribution play critical roles in delineating emergency zones, estimating population at risk, and determining evacuation routes. There are situations in which it is possible to plan in advance for an emergency evacuation including, for example, an explosion at a chemical processing facility or a radiological accident at a nuclear plant. In these cases, if an accident or a terrorist attack were to happen, then the best evacuation plan for the prevailing network and weather conditions would be deployed. In other instances -for example, the derailment of a train transporting hazardous materials-, there may not be any previously developed plan to be implemented and decisions must be made ad-hoc on if and how to identify and proceed with the best course of action to minimize losses. Although both cases require as a starting point the development of a transportation network model of the area at risk, which must include road capacity and topology, in the latter the available time to generate this network is extremely limited. This time constraint precludes the use of any traditional data gathering methodology and the network generation process has to rely on the use of GIS and stochastic modeling techniques. The generation of these transportation networks in real time is the focus of this entry.
- Research Organization:
- Oak Ridge National Lab. (ORNL), Oak Ridge, TN (United States)
- Sponsoring Organization:
- USDOE Laboratory Directed Research and Development (LDRD) Program
- DOE Contract Number:
- AC05-00OR22725
- OSTI ID:
- 1036535
- Country of Publication:
- United States
- Language:
- English
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