The evacuation operations problem aims to avoid or mitigate the potential loss of life in a regionthreatened/affected by a disaster. It is shaped by the evolution of evacuation traffic resultingfrom the demand-supply interactions of the associated transportation network. Information-basedcontrol is a strategic tool for evacuation traffic operations as it can enable greater access to theaffected population and more effective response. This study develops a control module forevacuation operations centered on addressing the demand-supply interactions by using behavior consistentinformation strategies. These strategies incorporate the likely responses of evacuees tothe information provided in the determination of route guidance information. The control moduleworks as an iterative computational process involving an evacuee route choice model and acontrol model of information strategies to determine the route guidance information to directevacuation traffic so as to approach a desired network traffic flow pattern. The problem isformulated as a fuzzy logic based optimization framework to explicitly incorporate practicalconcerns related to information dissemination characteristics and social equity in evacuationoperations. Numerical experiments highlight the importance of accounting for the demand supplyinteractions, as the use of behavior-consistent information strategies can lead evacueeroute choices to approach the operator-desired proportions corresponding to the desired trafficpattern. The results also indicate that while a behavior-consistent information strategy can beeffective, gaps with the desired route proportions can exist due to the discrete linguistic nature ofthe messages and the real-world difficulty in accurately modeling evacuees’ actual route choicebehavior.
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