Data-driven evacuation and rescue traffic optimization with rescue contraflow control

Abstract

In response to local sudden disasters, e.g., high-rise office or residential building fire disasters, road occupation can cause conflicts, and traffic directions may be opposite between evacuation vehicles and rescue vehicles; moreover, lane contraflow can be adopted to meet these surge traffic demands. However, lane contraflow that provides more roads for rescue vehicles reduces the traffic supply in the evacuation direction. It is unclear how to control the number of contraflow roads used by rescue vehicles to coordinate evacuation and rescue traffic operations. Here, we adjust the critical rescue traffic volume of reversing the normal road traffic direction to control rescue contraflow. Additionally, we propose a multiobjective mixed integer linear programming formulation for evacuation and rescue traffic optimization. Additionally, considering that the upper limit of the critical rescue traffic volume is unknown and that the proposed formulation includes multiple objectives and multi-priority vehicle classes, a three-stage solving algorithm is developed. Next, a large-scale evacuation and rescue traffic optimization result dataset is obtained for the Nguyen–Dupuis road network, and the impact of different rescue contraflow control plans on evacuation and rescue traffic is studied based on data-driven statistical analysis. The results show that by adjusting the optimal rescue traffic route, the critical rescue traffic volume for reversing the normal road traffic direction can reduce the interference of rescue traffic to evacuation traffic operation performance without reducing rescue traffic operation performance, and can be used to coordinate evacuation and rescue traffic operation under rescue contraflow.