Real-Time Traffic Information for Emergency Evacuations

Abstract

There are many instances in which it is possible to plan ahead for an emergency evacuation (e.g., a chemical processing facility explosion). For those cases, if an accident were to happen, then the best evacuation plan for the prevailing network and weather conditions would be deployed. In other cases (e.g., 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 how to proceed with an emergency evacuation. In both situations, the availability of real-time traffic information plays a critical role in the management of the evacuation operations. Due to cost constraints, only large urban areas have traffic sensor deployments that permit access to some sort of real-time traffic information; an evacuation taking place in other areas of the country would have to proceed without real-time traffic information. To improve operations during a vehicular emergency evacuation anywhere, a system of sensors that uses newly developed real-time traffic-information-gathering technologies to assess traffic conditions and to detect incidents on the main evacuation routes is presented in this article. A series of tests, in a controlled environment and in the field, were conducted to study the feasibility of such a system of traffic sensors and to assess its ability to provide real-time traffic information during an emergency evacuation. The results of these tests indicated that the prototype sensors are reliable and accurate for the type of application that is the focus of this article.

Keywords:

• real-time traffic information
• emergency evacuations
• traffic sensor

Acknowledgments

This project was sponsored by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security through the Southeast Region Research Initiative (SERRI). The authors would like to thank both organizations for funding and supporting this project. The authors would also like to recognize Mr. Steven Hilliard and Mr. Geoffrey Yerem from IST, Inc. for their technical support and valuable discussions. Finally, the authors would also like to thank the graduate and undergraduate students from the Civil and Environmental Engineering Department of Mississippi State University who helped in the data collection phase, Paul Foley, Ebony Lyons, Jennifer Sloan, Jizhan Gou, Di Wu and James Burke.