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American Society for Testing and Materials

Regression Analysis of Count Data: Preface

This paper presents a review of highway-based evacuation modeling and simulation and its evolution over the past decade. The review includes the major components of roadway transportation planning and operations, including the current state of modeling in the forecasting of evacuation travel demand, distribution and assignment of evacuation demand to regional road networks to reach destinations, assignment of evacuees to various modes of transportation, and evaluation and testing of alternative management strategies to increase capacity of evacuation networks or manage demand. Although this discussion does not cover recent work in other modes used in evacuation such as air, rail, and pedestrian, this paper does highlight recent interdisciplinary modeling work in evacuation to help bridge the gap between the behavioral sciences and engineering and the application of emerging techniques for the verification, validation, and calibration of models. The manuscript also calls attention to special considerations and logistical difficulties, which have received limited attention to date. In addition to these concerns, the following future directions are discussed: further interdisciplinary efforts, including incorporating the medical community; using new technologies for communication of warnings and traffic condition information, data collection, and increased modeling resolution and confidence; using real-time information; and further model refinements and validation.

Evacuation transportation modeling: An overview of research, development, and practice

Models, solutions and enabling technologies in humanitarian logistics

The field of supply chain management has been extensively studied, while its role in disaster relief operations has received limited contributions. Recent dedicated special issues on Humanitarian Operations and Supply Chain Management (HOSCM) and a dedicated Journal focusing on humanitarian logistics and supply chain management clearly indicate the growing popularity of the HOSCM literature. The purpose of our current study is to undertake an extensive review of extant literature published in operations and supply chain management journals as well as popular interdisciplinary journals. A review of 362 papers published between 2011 and 2017 provides a thematic outline of the study. The study pivots around nine key themes, which have gained prominent attention from HOSCM scholars, and draws a roadmap from reviewing earlier review papers to performance evaluation of HOSCM related studies. Some of the key themes include humanitarian logistics, theory focused research, case studies, mathematical models, humanitarian supply chain properties and resources needed for efficient and effective management of humanitarian operations. Finally, our study offers several research directions which may take the existing debates to a next level.

Humanitarian supply chain management: a thematic literature review and future directions of research

Several recent mass evacuations, including those in advance of Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans and Hurricane Rita in Houston, have demonstrated the effects of limited planning for carless populations. The lack of planning left a significant portion of the mobility-limited population of both these cities unable to flee in advance of the storms. Since 2005, however, both of these cities (as well as others across the United States) have developed transit-assisted mass evacuation plans at various levels of detail. Because these plans are relatively recent and do not have a history of experience on which to base their performance, it is difficult to know how well, or even if, they will work. This article describes one of the first attempts to systematically model and simulate transit-based evacuation strategies. In it, the development of and the results gained from an application of the TRansportation ANalysis and SIMulation System (TRANSIMS) agent-based transportation simulation system to model assisted evac...

Transit-Based Emergency Evacuation Simulation Modeling

Mass evacuations of urbanized areas can be expected to generate traffic demand significantly in excess of routine daily travel conditions. Depending on the nature of the hazard and the population characteristics within the threat area, the elevated demand conditions may last for several days and can impact thousands of miles of roads. This paper presents the results of a project to evaluate the impact of a transit bus-based evacuation on the operation of a regional road network during a mass evacuation. In the project, the TRANSIMS agent-based simulation system was used to model the Citizen-Assisted Evacuation Plan (CAEP) for the City of New Orleans within the context of a general evacuation. Regional plans developed by Louisiana officials to support the evacuation of low-mobility individuals when under threat of hurricanes were used to code the model. However, because these plans have yet to be fully implemented, their benefits, effect on the overall evacuation operation, and the adequacy of the service they will provide has not been evaluated. In this the operational traffic characteristics of the busses and other vehicles involved in the evacuation operation were simulated under a range of conditions. The results showed that while the CAEP busses were able to increase the total number of people evacuated from the threat area, the additional vehicles had a minimal impact when they were routed exclusively to arterial evacuation routes. However, when bussed were routed to more heavily utilized freeways, travel delays increased and congestion queues increased by about 50 percent.

Performance of traffic networks during multimodal evacuations: simulation-based assessment

Following the obvious failings to effectively evacuate the low-mobility populations from New Orleans for Hurricane Katrina, state and local officials in Louisiana as well as their federal counterparts, developed a revised evacuation plan for the region that includes a much greater usage of public transit resources The 2006 post-Katrina New Orleans City Assisted Evacuation Plan relies on busses, trains, and even airplanes to ferry out elderly, infirm, tourists, and economically disadvantaged residents of the city using a complex relay system that spans between various modes and locations Although officials are confident that the new plan will eliminate much of the delays and suffering experienced by these low-mobility individuals, at the time of this research and development project the plan was not yet complete and had never been tested or evaluated to any degree The city assisted evacuation plan for New Orleans is one of the cornerstones of the city's emergency preparedness position to assist the elderly, sick, and poor However, it had never been used, practiced, or even simulated and no one knew how well or even if it will actually work In this project the Transportation Analysis and Simulation System (TRANSIMS) was applied for emergency transportation planning and analysis In this effort, the TRANSIMS platform was used to develop a transportation model to simulate the travel processes associated with an evacuation of the New Orleans Louisiana metropolitan region Given the temporal and spatial scales of mass evacuations, it was theorized that the scalability and level of detail afforded by the TRANSIMS program would make it an ideal system to model, test, and evaluate evacuation and other emergency transportation plans

Application of TRANSIMS for the Multimodal Microscale Simulation of the New Orleans Emergency Evacuation Plan

Mass evacuations of urbanized areas can be expected to generate traffic demand significantly in excess of what is encountered under routine daily travel conditions. Depending on the nature of the hazard and the population characteristics within the threat area, the elevated demand conditions may last for several hours or even days and can impact a few hundred to perhaps tens of thousands of square miles of land area. Under such conditions, traffic congestion can impact both the evacuation routes and the feeder roads that bring traffic to them. This paper presents the result of a project to evaluate the impact of a transit-based evacuation on the operation of a road network during a major evacuation. In the project, the TRANSIMS agent-based simulation system was used to model the citizen assisted evacuation plan (CEAP) for the City of New Orleans within the context of a general evacuation. The CEAP is a regional plan developed by Louisiana officials to support the evacuation of low-mobility individuals when under threat of hurricanes. Because it has yet to be fully implemented, the expected benefits of this plan, its effect on the overall region-wide evacuation, and the adequacy of the planned bus service has yet to be completely evaluated. This study seeks to address the need for this knowledge by using the average evacuation travel speed, queue length, and travel delay to assess the evacuation operation under a range of conditions. The simulation results showed that while the busses were able to increase the total number of people evacuated from the threat area, the additional vehicles it required had a minimal impact on the arterial evacuation routes. However, significant queuing and delay was evident for the busses on certain segments of freeway evacuation routes.

Performance of Multi-Modal Evacuation Traffic Networks: A Simulation Based Assessment

/pdf/transit-based-emergency-evacuation-modeling-with-microscopic-2vhelpj23s.pdf

Hana Naghawi

Papers

Transit-Based Emergency Evacuation Simulation Modeling

Performance of traffic networks during multimodal evacuations: simulation-based assessment

Application of TRANSIMS for the Multimodal Microscale Simulation of the New Orleans Emergency Evacuation Plan

Performance of Multi-Modal Evacuation Traffic Networks: A Simulation Based Assessment

Transit-based emergency evacuation modeling with microscopic simulation