An Urban Evacuation Routing Plan for an Emergency Response System Using Real-Time Traffic Data

Disasters have always threatened human beings in an urban context. With development of the sciences and the technologies for emergency rescue, consequences can be significantly diminished. The evacuation of injured people from shelters to the medical centers by emergency vehicles through the transportation network is an important step in emergency response system. The travel times of the transportation network in emergency situation are both unpredictable and unstable. Hence, dynamic routing of emergency vehicles which can be adaptive toward the variations of travel times would be beneficial. This paper solved a dynamic vehicle routing problem in a way that real time travel times had been used to update the routing scheme of the vehicles. This study took advantage of intelligent transportation system (ITS), geospatial information system (GIS), global positioning system (GPS), and general packet radio service (GPRS). Simulated annealing heuristic was used for solving the dynamic vehicle routing problem. The model was applied to a real urban network for emergency response vehicles. The results supported our proposed method and verified that the total travel time of dynamic scenarios was decreased by the average of 22 percent compared to static scenarios.

Keywords:

Urban dynamic vehicle routing problem , Emergency response system , Simulated annealing heuristic , Real time traffic information