Evacuation Planning Using the Integrated System of Activity-Based Modeling and Dynamic Traffic Assignment

The occurrence of natural disasters in the coastal regions and numerous potential events within urban regions has drawn considerable attention among transportation stakeholders. Federal, state and local officials need to be effectively prepared to address the challenges raised by an evacuation. The focus of this research effort is to develop a tool to study the repercussions of evacuation of an entire regional transportation network recognizing the human behavior element. Neglecting these seemingly chaotic traffic flow patterns would lead to inaccurate system assessment and predictions. We study the influences of evacuees' locations in the urban region at the moment of emergency alert. In addition, we identify the locations of all the members of the household and explicitly consider household member interactions. Further, we study the accurate times the individuals enter the network to evacuate the study region, which can vary based on where the other household members are located at that time and the travel time on the network to reach these locations. To accomplish the goals, we employ the integration framework of activity based modeling and dynamic traffic assignment to study the evacuation traffic flow patterns at the time of evacuation. Specifically, the paper formulates the evacuation problem and discusses the utility of deploying the integrated module of activity-based modeling and dynamic traffic assignment for evacuation planning and outlines the challenges in integrating these two tools.