Integrated Urban Evacuation Planning Framework for Responding to Human-Caused Disasters over a Surface Transportation Network

Abstract

The purpose of emergency evacuation is to move people away from a dangerous place because of a threat or an occurrence of a natural or a human-caused disastrous event. Although research has investigated emergency evacuations during hurricanes and nuclear power plant disasters, there is a lack of comprehensive, interdisciplinary research on urban evacuation planning by the use of surface transportation networks, especially for terrorist-induced emergencies. Recent disasters reveal how different factors hinder emergency evacuations in urban areas. Therefore, it is imperative to investigate how these factors should be taken into account in establishing an urban evacuation strategy. To achieve this goal, a framework for an integrated urban emergency evacuation contingency plan (IUE2CP) was developed to provide a basis for creating an emergency evaluation preparedness system. Such a system can raise public awareness of the evacuation procedures and provide guidelines for municipal governments. First, the paper presents the components of the IUE2CP framework, including the novel concept of the emergency evacuation backbone network. The Beijing Olympic Green serves as a case study of the IUE2CP initiative. Second, evacuation network planning objective models are structured, including harm zone and buffer zone traffic control planning objective models. Third, the primary requirements for emergency evacuation communication systems are discussed. Finally, to include human behavior factors in IUE2CP, the concepts of situation awareness and distributed situation awareness are introduced, and the framework for their application in the feed-forward and feedback control mechanisms during evacuation is presented.