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A-RESCUE: An Agent based Regional Evacuation Simulator Coupled with User Enriched Behavior

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Abstract

Household behavior and dynamic traffic flows are the two most important aspects of hurricane evacuations. However, current evacuation models largely overlook the complexity of household behavior leading to oversimplified traffic assignments and, as a result, inaccurate evacuation clearance times in the network. In this paper, we present a high fidelity multi-agent simulation model called A-RESCUE (Agent-based Regional Evacuation Simulator Coupled with User Enriched behavior) that integrates the rich activity behavior of the evacuating households with the network level assignment to predict and evaluate evacuation clearance times. The simulator can generate evacuation demand on the fly, truly capturing the dynamic nature of a hurricane evacuation. The simulator consists of two major components: household decision-making module and traffic flow module. In the simulation, each household is an agent making various evacuation related decisions based on advanced behavioral models. From household decisions, a number of vehicles are generated and entered in the evacuation transportation network at different time intervals. An adaptive routing strategy that can achieve efficient network-wide traffic measurements is proposed. Computational results are presented based on simulations over the Miami-Dade network with detailed representation of the road network geometry. The simulation results demonstrate the evolution of traffic congestion as a function of the household decision-making, the variance of the congestion across different areas relative to the storm path and the most congested O-D pairs in the network. The simulation tool can be used as a planning tool to make decisions related to how traffic information should be communicated and in the design of traffic management policies such as contra-flow strategies during evacuations.

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Acknowledgments

This research presented in this paper was supported by National Science Foundation Awards SES-0826874 and CMMI 1520338 for which the authors are grateful. However, the authors are solely responsible for the findings of the research work.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Lyles School of Civil Engineering, Purdue University, 550 Stadium Mall Drive, West Lafayette, IN, 47907, USA

    Satish V. Ukkusuri, Binh Luong & Xianyuan Zhan

  2. CSIRO, Cities Program, Land & Water Flagship, Bayview Ave, Clayton, VIC, 3168, Australia

    Samiul Hasan

  3. Urban-Civil Works Construction Investment Management Authority of Ho Chi Minh City, Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam

    Kien Doan

  4. Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, Virginia Tech, 7054 Haycock Road, Falls Church, VA, 22043, USA

    Pamela Murray-Tuite & Weihao Yin

Authors
  1. Satish V. Ukkusuri
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  2. Samiul Hasan
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  3. Binh Luong
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  4. Kien Doan
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  5. Xianyuan Zhan
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  6. Pamela Murray-Tuite
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  7. Weihao Yin
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Correspondence to Satish V. Ukkusuri.

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Ukkusuri, S.V., Hasan, S., Luong, B. et al. A-RESCUE: An Agent based Regional Evacuation Simulator Coupled with User Enriched Behavior. Netw Spat Econ 17, 197–223 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11067-016-9323-0

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11067-016-9323-0

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