Actions for Efficient Evacuation For Disaster Management

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Efficient Evacuation For Disaster Management

Author
Madireddy, Manini
Published
[University Park, Pennsylvania] : Pennsylvania State University, 2015.
Physical Description
1 electronic document
Additional Creators
Kumara, Soundar T., 1952-
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Open Access.
Summary
During an evacuation, evacuees experience congestion which leads to evacuation inefficiencies. The efficiency of an evacuation process is primarily determined by the decision adopted by the evacuees. There are two critical decisions that every evacuee has to make: (a) when to evacuate and (b) which route to take. In this thesis, we build mathematical models to study the impact of evacuee behavior on evacuation process and propose strategies to improve evacuation efficiency. One of the first decisions an evacuee makes is the departure timing decision. Evacuee departure timing decisions are important as simultaneous evacuations leads to congestion. One of the reasons for near simultaneous departures is higher perceived risk of threat spread through social contacts. We built an individual level departure time choice model incorporating both evacuee individual characteristics and the evacuee social influence. We also propose a traffic control strategy to alleviate congestion. We find that the performance of an evacuation process can be improved by forcing a small subset of evacuees (inhibitors) in the low risk area to delay their departure. The performance of an evacuation is measured by both average travel time of the population and total evacuation time of the high risk evacuees. We derive closed form expressions for average travel time for ER random network. Further we perform detailed experimentation to study the impact of evacuee network topology, risk distribution and control strategy on evacuation performance. Once an evacuee decides to evacuate they need to identify the best route to destination. During evacuation evacuees tend to behave non-altruistically and try to optimize their own individual utility. This leads to over utilization/ congestion on certain road segments. There are several traffic control strategies but most of them assume altruistic evacuee behavior. We propose traffic control strategies - blocking and throttling to improve evacuation efficiency. These strategies manipulate the evacuee behavior (i.e. routing choice) by altering the topology of the underlying transportation network. We built a simulation model to understand the impact of transportation road network topology, evacuee behavior and control strategy on evacuation efficiency.
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Dissertation Note
Ph.D. Pennsylvania State University 2015.
Reproduction Note
Microfilm (positive). 1 reel ; 35 mm. (University Microfilms 10-025268)
Technical Details
The full text of the dissertation is available as an Adobe Acrobat .pdf file ; Adobe Acrobat Reader required to view the file.
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