Relocating Children in Daytime No-notice Evacuations: Methodology and Applications for Transport Systems of Personal Vehicles and Buses

摘要

Under no-notice conditions with family members collecting dependents, the geographiclocation and characteristics (e.g. number of entrances/exits) of these pickup points becomecrucial factors to efficient evacuation. This paper presents a linear integer mathematicalprogram for facilities to relocate, optimally, dependents that need to be picked up. Theprogram is iterated with a traffic simulation model to obtain an optimal set of locations basedon anticipated travel times with dependents relocated to those sites. The entire methodologyis applied to a sample network based on Chicago Heights, Illinois with three safety timethresholds. The results indicated that the safe evacuation time threshold is important to therelocation strategy. When the safe evacuation threshold is adequate, relocating dependents offacilities increases the number of successful evacuees and increases average travel speed ofthe total network; it also significantly benefits those who rely on public transit to evacuatebecause new sites are closer to bus stops and walking times to stops are reduced. Applicationof the proposed methodology can assist local decision-makers to take effective measuresduring no-notice evacuation and the relocation sites could be part of local evacuationmanagement plans.