Download or read book Development of a Large scale Traffic Simulation Model for Hurricane Evacuation written by Siddharth Sharma and published by . This book was released on 2008 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Hurricanes are one of the most catastrophic events resulting in severe consequences including loss of life and property damage. Emergency management teams play a huge role in safeguarding the lives of people in endangered areas by evacuating them to safer locations as efficiently as possible. This study was undertaken to evaluate the traffic control plan (TCP), for the Hampton Roads region of Virginia, and the performance of the designated evacuation routes using large-scale traffic simulation models. Road network was coded in a state-of the- art microscopic simulation program, VISSIM. The emergency evacuation plan for the study area was evaluated by simulating the various evacuation scenarios as described in the abbreviated transportation model (ATM) for Hampton Roads region. The study area comprised of the following nine evacuation areas - cities of Virginia Beach, Norfolk, Chesapeake, Portsmouth, Suffolk, Hampton, Newport News, Poquoson, and York. The following objectives were achieved in this research - 1) estimated the traffic performance of evacuation routes and other major arterial streets, 2) located the major bottlenecks, congestion, or other operational difficulties in the areas covered by the network, 3) estimated the total network evacuation time, 4) conducted what-if scenarios (e.g., incident occurrences), and 5) recommended amendments to the TCP to improve the traffic performance.

Download or read book Use and Comparison of Traffic Simulation Models in the Analysis of Emergency Evacuation Conditions written by and published by . This book was released on 2003 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The evacuation of vulnerable coastal areas in the event of an emergency such as an impending hurricane has become a significant safety issue due to the rapid growth of both permanent and tourist populations in these areas. Highway capacity has often not been upgraded in line with this demand growth. In the case of Hurricane Floyd in 1999, evacuations of areas of North and South Carolina resulted in several highly congested primary highways and, as a result, several states created Lane Reversal Plans for interstates and/or divided highways along evacuation routes. However, these plans were created with little data to rely on as to their efficiency. A major research study was funded by the North Carolina Department of Transportation (NCDOT) to use simulation modeling to investigate the effects of the Interstate 40 Lane Reversal Plan on the evacuation of Wilmington and New Hanover County, North Carolina. In addition to the analysis of the effects of lane reversal, a side-by-side comparison of the CORSIM and VISSIM simulation models was performed on the highway network based on demand estimates provided by a demand study performed for the United States Army Corps of Engineers and the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA). Analysis using CORSIM and VISSIM showed lane reversal to provide considerable capacity increases to traffic attempting to exit New Hanover County via Interstate 40, which had significantly increased throughput and decreased queues within New Hanover County in the event of large-scale evacuations.

Download or read book Large Scale Evacuation written by Michael K. Lindell and published by CRC Press. This book was released on 2018-12-07 with total page 327 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Large-Scale Evacuation introduces the reader to the steps involved in evacuation modelling for towns and cities, from understanding the hazards that can require large-scale evacuations, through understanding how local officials decide to issue evacuation advisories and households decide whether to comply, to transportation simulation and traffic management strategies. The author team has been recognized internationally for their research and consulting experience in the field of evacuations. Collectively, they have 125 years of experience in evacuation, including more than 140 projects for federal and state agencies. The text explains how to model evacuations that use the road transportation network by combining perspectives from social scientists and transportation engineers, fields that have commonly approached evacuation modelling from distinctly different perspectives. In doing so, it offers a step-by-step guide through the key questions needed to model an evacuation and its impacts to the evacuation route system as well as evacuation management strategies for influencing demand and expanding capacity. The authors also demonstrate how to simulate the resulting traffic and evacuation management strategies that can be used to facilitate evacuee movement and reduce unnecessary demand. Case studies, which identify key points to analyze in an evacuation plan, discuss evacuation termination and re-entry, and highlight challenges that someone developing an evacuation plan or model should expect, are also included. This textbook will be of interest to researchers, practitioners, and advanced students.

Download or read book Large Scale Evacuation written by Michael K. Lindell and published by CRC Press. This book was released on 2018-12-07 with total page 347 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Large-Scale Evacuation introduces the reader to the steps involved in evacuation modelling for towns and cities, from understanding the hazards that can require large-scale evacuations, through understanding how local officials decide to issue evacuation advisories and households decide whether to comply, to transportation simulation and traffic management strategies. The author team has been recognized internationally for their research and consulting experience in the field of evacuations. Collectively, they have 125 years of experience in evacuation, including more than 140 projects for federal and state agencies. The text explains how to model evacuations that use the road transportation network by combining perspectives from social scientists and transportation engineers, fields that have commonly approached evacuation modelling from distinctly different perspectives. In doing so, it offers a step-by-step guide through the key questions needed to model an evacuation and its impacts to the evacuation route system as well as evacuation management strategies for influencing demand and expanding capacity. The authors also demonstrate how to simulate the resulting traffic and evacuation management strategies that can be used to facilitate evacuee movement and reduce unnecessary demand. Case studies, which identify key points to analyze in an evacuation plan, discuss evacuation termination and re-entry, and highlight challenges that someone developing an evacuation plan or model should expect, are also included. This textbook will be of interest to researchers, practitioners, and advanced students.

Download or read book Modeling Hurricane Evacuation Traffic written by Haoqiang Fu and published by . This book was released on 2006 with total page 146 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Little attention has been given to estimating dynamic travel demand in transportation planning in the past. However, when factors influencing travel are changing significantly over time - such as with an approaching hurricane - dynamic demand and the resulting variation in traffic flow on the network become important. In this study, dynamic travel demand models for hurricane evacuation were developed with two methodologies: survival analysis and sequential choice model. Using survival analysis, the time before evacuation from a pending hurricane is modeled with those that do not evacuate considered as censored observations. A Cox proportional hazards regression model with time-dependent variables and a Piecewise Exponential model were estimated. In the sequential choice model, the decision to evacuate in the face of an oncoming hurricane is considered as a series of binary choices over time. A sequential logit model and a sequential complementary log-log model were developed. Each model is capable of predicting the probability of a household evacuating at each time period before hurricane landfall as a function of the household's socio-economic characteristics, the characteristics of the hurricane (such as distance to the storm), and policy decisions (such as the issuing of evacuation orders). Three datasets were used in this study. They were data from southwest Louisiana collected following Hurricane Andrew, data from South Carolina collected following Hurricane Floyd, and stated preference survey data collected from the New Orleans area. Based on the analysis, the sequential logit model was found to be the best alternative for modeling dynamic travel demand for hurricane evacuation. The sequential logit model produces predictions which are superior to those of the current evacuation participation rate models with response curves. Transfer of the sequential logit model estimated on the Floyd data to the Andrew data demonstrated that the sequential logit model is capable of estimating dynamic travel demand in a different environment than the one in which it was estimated with reasonable accuracy. However, more study is required on the transferability of models of this type, as well as the development of procedures that would allow the updating of transferred model parameters to better reflect local evacuation behavior.

Download or read book Development of a Dynamic Traffic Assignment Model to Evaluate Lane reversal Plans for I 65 written by Virginia P. Sisiopiku and published by . This book was released on 2010 with total page 57 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "This report presents the methodology and results from a project that studied contra-flow operations in support of hurricane evacuations in the state of Alabama. As part of this effort, a simulation model was developed using the VISTA platform for I-65 from the Alabama Gulf Coast region to Montgomery, AL and alternative evacuation routes. The model was used to test the current lane-reversal plan under a variety of evacuation scenarios and assess the potential impacts of modifications to this plan. Special attention was given to the development of realistic evacuation demand profiles to account for user preferences and seasonal (tourist) demand. The report discusses traffic and evacuation plan requirements and acquisition, model development and calibration approach, evacuation scenarios considered and results from the systems analyses and scenarios evaluation. Moreover, it highlights some of the challenges in the development of large scale mesoscopic model for evacuation analyses. A summary of recommendations is also included that can be used to improve current practices and assist future traffic management under evacuation conditions."--Technical report documentation page.

Download or read book The Gravity Model in Transportation Analysis written by Sven Erlander and published by VSP. This book was released on 1990-12 with total page 252 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Analisi: TRASPORTI. In generale. ECONOMETRIA. Econometria applicata.

Download or read book Hurricane Evacuation Modeling written by Lei Fang (Engineer) and published by . This book was released on 2013 with total page 119 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Hurricane evacuation has attracted renewed emphasis since hurricane Katrina in 2005. Every coastal state is establishing their evacuation guidelines and searching new methods to improve evacuations. In this dissertation, first, hurricane evacuation of the Hampton Roads region of Virginia is investigated using large-scale regional mesoscopic traffic simulation models. Fourteen evacuation scenarios consisting of various combinations of storm categories and traffic control strategies are evaluated. The evaluation of scenarios provided information on the clearance time, average travel times, bottleneck locations, and congestion durations. The major findings from scenario evaluations include: (1) The differences in participation rates (100% versus 70%) did not impact the clearance times in a Category 1 storm evacuation, but have significant impact in a Category 3 storm evacuation, (2) The status (open or close) of a critical tunnel crossing, the Monitor-Merrimac Memorial Bridge-Tunnel did not have impact on the evacuation performance in Category 1 and 2 storm. However, opening the tunnel would improve the performance in a Category 3 storm, (3) The clearance times derived from simulations can be used to determine when to issue evacuation orders for various storm intensities, and (4) The bottleneck locations and durations identified for each evacuation scenario can be used to allocate the limited traffic monitoring equipment during an evacuation. The second focus of this dissertation is to investigate the impact of assumptions made regarding evacuee route choice on evacuation performance estimates. In the hurricane evacuation literature, very few studies have documented the realistic route choice behavior of evacuees during a hurricane. Due to this lack of realistic route choice behavior data, modelers make assumptions about the route choice behavior and traffic assignment. User-equilibrium traffic assignment has been extensively used in past evacuation studies. In this dissertation, realistic route choice behavior was determined by evaluating findings of a few published studies. The impact of route choice behavior on evacuation performance, especially travel times, is then investigated using the regional simulation model of the Hampton Roads region. The analysis found that the user-equilibrium traffic assignment significantly underestimates the travel times during an evacuation. The extent of underestimation of evacuation travel times depends on the total evacuation demand (a function of storm intensity), and the percent of evacuees willing to use en-route information to seek alternate routes when facing congestion. For the three en-route percentages reported in the literature i.e., 30%, 50%, and 70%, the UE travel times were 58%, 42%, and 33% lower than actual travel times realized in a Category 1; 94%, 71%, and 57% lower in a Category 2; and 90%, 69%, and 54% lower in a Category 3 evacuation. These findings illustrate the need to collect real-world data on evacuee route choice in order to build accurate evacuation models. The third focus of dissertation is to propose a procedure to assess the benefit of adding additional intermediate crossovers on a contra flow facility. Contra flow operation in which the direction of traffic on one or more travel lanes is reversed in order to increase the capacity of a road network is becoming a critical component of the evacuation plans of coastal states. Several coastal states have a contra flow plan in place for evacuation, however only a few states have intermediate crossovers between the origin and termination points. The impact of intermediate crossovers on network performance has not been well investigated in previous research. This dissertation investigates the benefits of having intermediate crossovers between regular and contra flow lanes. Based on the investigation, it can be concluded that adding intermediate crossovers did improve network performance for medium and high evacuation demand situations. Adding intermediate crossovers for low demand situations did not improve the network performance and thus any considerations for intermediate crossovers for the low demand evacuations must be based solely on providing access to road-side services (gas, food, and others). For high and medium demand situations and for the road network studied in this section, a 28% improvement in the average travel time was observed by deploying four intermediate crossovers out of the 44 potential crossover locations. The iterative elimination procedure proposed in this dissertation is the first attempt in the literature to provide a systematic approach to determine the critical intermediate crossover locations within reasonable computation times.

Download or read book Fundamentals of Traffic Simulation written by Jaume Barceló and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2011-01-06 with total page 450 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The increasing power of computer technologies, the evolution of software en- neering and the advent of the intelligent transport systems has prompted traf c simulation to become one of the most used approaches for traf c analysis in s- port of the design and evaluation of traf c systems. The ability of traf c simulation to emulate the time variability of traf c phenomena makes it a unique tool for capturing the complexity of traf c systems. In recent years, traf c simulation – and namely microscopic traf c simulation – has moved from the academic to the professional world. A wide variety of traf- c simulation software is currently available on the market and it is utilized by thousands of users, consultants, researchers and public agencies. Microscopic traf c simulation based on the emulation of traf c ows from the dynamics of individual vehicles is becoming one the most attractive approaches. However, traf c simulation still lacks a uni ed treatment. Dozens of papers on theory and applications are published in scienti c journals every year. A search of simulation-related papers and workshops through the proceedings of the last annual TRB meetings would support this assertion, as would a review of the minutes from speci cally dedicated meetings such as the International Symposiums on Traf c Simulation (Yokohama, 2002; Lausanne, 2006; Brisbane, 2008) or the International Workshops on Traf c Modeling and Simulation (Tucson, 2001; Barcelona, 2003; Sedona, 2005; Graz 2008). Yet, the only comprehensive treatment of the subject to be found so far is in the user’s manuals of various software products.

Download or read book Mathematical Models for Evacuation Planning in Urban Areas written by Sarah Bretschneider and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2012-07-20 with total page 209 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Disasters like floods, hurricanes, chemical or nuclear accidents may cause the necessity to evacuate the affected area. The evacuation of the urban area needs to be planned carefully. One issue is the reorganization of the traffic routing. Congested urban areas have usually complex street networks that are composed of many intersections with streets connecting them. The population density of a congested urban area is usually high and the street network is already used to capacity during rush hour traffic. The considered problem of this work is the reorganization of the traffic routing of an urban area for the case of an emergency mass evacuation. Especially aspects of the evacuation like safety, avoidance of delays and the total system travel time are taken into account. Combinatorial and graph theoretical aspects are adapted for the evacuation problem and highlight issues concerning especially conflicts within intersections. This work gives an extensive summary of literature of evacuation of urban areas. Mixed-integer linear programming models are developed for evacuation problems and heuristic algorithms are provided and tested.?

Download or read book Simulation Study of Impacts of Evacuating Traffic on En route Metropolitan Highway Network written by and published by . This book was released on 2009 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In response to both natural and man-made disasters, more and more emergency evacuation plans have been put forward and consistently aims to move a large disaster affected population through a multimodal transportation network towards safer areas as quickly and efficiently as possible. The objectives of this paper are 1) to verify the feasibility of applying the DYNASMART-P model to simulation of traffic characteristics in both normal and emergency conditions for the urban transportation system in the Greater Jackson metropolitan area in Mississippi and 2) to develop and evaluate emergency evacuation strategies for a large scale evacuation of people under emergency conditions in the Greater Jackson area. In this paper, traffic network including Hinds, Madison and Rankin was built through the mesoscopic traffic-network planning and simulation model DYNASMART-P based on the dynamic traffic assignment methodology, and applied the model to a highway network on the route of the evacuation. The background OD demand as input for the simulation program was calibrated using observed traffic volume data collected in several critical routes of evacuation. An evacuation scenario was designed to study the impacts of the evacuating traffic from southeastern Louisiana to the Greater Jackson Metropolitan Area of Mississippi due to an assumed approaching hurricane disaster. Critically congested freeway segments under two evacuation intensity levels were identified based on the criterion of the average queue length percentage and level of service. The causes for the congestion of roads were analyzed and explained.

Download or read book Handbook of OR MS Models in Hazardous Materials Transportation written by Rajan Batta and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2013-06-06 with total page 297 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration of the U.S. Department of Transportation defines hazardous materials (hazmat) as a substance or material capable of posing an unreasonable risk to health, safety, or property when transported in commerce. Hazmat accidents can result in significant impact to the population (death, injuries) and damage to the environment (destroyed or damaged buildings and infrastructure). Further, hazmat, especially explosive materials, can potentially be used by terrorists to attack civilians or to destroy critical infrastructure. This handbook provides models from Operations Research and Management Science that study various activities involving hazmat transportation: risk assessment, route planning, location decisions, evacuation planning, and emergency planning for terrorist attacks. There are two important research areas in hazmat transportation that are widely studied in the literature: risk assessment and shipment planning. In the risk assessment area, important issues include measurement of accident probabilities and consequences in hazmat transport. Example works in the risk assessment area include modeling risk probability distribution over given areas, considering hazmat types and transport modes, and environmental conditions. The first half of this handbook covers the two fields of risk assessment and shipment planning, while the second half of this handbook provides useful models and insights on other important issues including location problems for undesirable facilities, network interdiction, terrorist attack, and evacuation.

Download or read book LTRC Technical Summary Report 408 written by Chester Wilmot and published by . This book was released on 2008 with total page 1 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book The Multi Agent Transport Simulation MATSim written by Andreas Horni and published by Ubiquity Press. This book was released on 2016-08-10 with total page 620 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The MATSim (Multi-Agent Transport Simulation) software project was started around 2006 with the goal of generating traffic and congestion patterns by following individual synthetic travelers through their daily or weekly activity programme. It has since then evolved from a collection of stand-alone C++ programs to an integrated Java-based framework which is publicly hosted, open-source available, automatically regression tested. It is currently used by about 40 groups throughout the world. This book takes stock of the current status. The first part of the book gives an introduction to the most important concepts, with the intention of enabling a potential user to set up and run basic simulations. The second part of the book describes how the basic functionality can be extended, for example by adding schedule-based public transit, electric or autonomous cars, paratransit, or within-day replanning. For each extension, the text provides pointers to the additional documentation and to the code base. It is also discussed how people with appropriate Java programming skills can write their own extensions, and plug them into the MATSim core. The project has started from the basic idea that traffic is a consequence of human behavior, and thus humans and their behavior should be the starting point of all modelling, and with the intuition that when simulations with 100 million particles are possible in computational physics, then behavior-oriented simulations with 10 million travelers should be possible in travel behavior research. The initial implementations thus combined concepts from computational physics and complex adaptive systems with concepts from travel behavior research. The third part of the book looks at theoretical concepts that are able to describe important aspects of the simulation system; for example, under certain conditions the code becomes a Monte Carlo engine sampling from a discrete choice model. Another important aspect is the interpretation of the MATSim score as utility in the microeconomic sense, opening up a connection to benefit cost analysis. Finally, the book collects use cases as they have been undertaken with MATSim. All current users of MATSim were invited to submit their work, and many followed with sometimes crisp and short and sometimes longer contributions, always with pointers to additional references. We hope that the book will become an invitation to explore, to build and to extend agent-based modeling of travel behavior from the stable and well tested core of MATSim documented here.

Download or read book Simulation of Urban Mobility written by Michael Behrisch and published by Springer. This book was released on 2014-11-06 with total page 182 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book constitutes the thoroughly refereed proceedings of the First International Conference on Simulation of Urban Mobility, SUMO 2013, held in Berlin, Germany, in May 2013. The 12 revised full papers presented tin this book were carefully selected and reviewed from 22 submissions. The papers are organized in two topical sections: models and technical innovations and applications and surveys.

Download or read book Computer Simulation based Framework for Transportation Evacuation in a Major Trip Generator written by Fengxiang Qiao and published by . This book was released on 2009 with total page 122 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Since emergencies including both natural disasters and man-made incidents, are happening more and more frequently, evacuation, especially transportation evacuation, is becoming a hot research focus in recent years. Currently, transportation evacuation study focuses on evacuating people and property from large areas and does not address the problem of transportation evacuation in a small and dense area. This research is intended to identify the study framework of developing transportation evacuation plans in small and dense areas. Texas Medical Center (TMC), Houston, Texas, is selected as case study in this thesis. Incidents are assumed based on potential threats. Traffic information is collected through filed data collections in the TMC area, and evacuation scenarios with incidents and management improvements are coded and simulated in VISSIM, a microscopic traffic simulation model. Genetic Algorithm is one of the calibration methods for searching multiple parameters at the same time and is used in this thesis to calibrate parameters of driving behaviors in VISSIM by using field collected and simulation data. Based on the simulation results, potential improvements and measurement of effectiveness (MOE) of operations such as Reversed Lane (RL) and In-bound Shuttle (IS) are analyzed and evaluated. Simulation results show that the evacuation would be much more efficient if appropriate operational strategies are implemented. Proper management improvements such as Reversed Lane and In-bound Shuttle could greatly maximize the number of persons/vehicles evacuated in the area. The selected operational plan can efficiently evacuate all persons in the Texas Medical Center in suitable simulation scenario under a given incident assumption. The framework of developing transportation evacuation plan is tested and proven to be effective in the Texas Medical Center. The microscopic simulation based study process is targeted on small and dense areas and it can be used in any other similar areas. It is recommended that further work be conducted to form a comprehensive evacuation plan.

Download or read book Intelligent Transportation and Evacuation Planning written by Arab Naser and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2012-06-09 with total page 121 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Intelligent Transportation and Evacuation Planning: A Modeling-Based Approach provides a new paradigm for evacuation planning strategies and techniques. Recently, evacuation planning and modeling have increasingly attracted interest among researchers as well as government officials. This interest stems from the recent catastrophic hurricanes and weather-related events that occurred in the southeastern United States (Hurricane Katrina and Rita). The evacuation methods that were in place before and during the hurricanes did not work well and resulted in thousands of deaths. This book offers insights into the methods and techniques that allow for implementing mathematical-based, simulation-based, and integrated optimization and simulation-based engineering approaches for evacuation planning.