Emergency traffic evacuation control based on the orthogonal experimental design method

Evacuees' behaviors have a significant impact on evacuation efficiency. Evacuation clearance time is one of the key indicators in the evacuation planning and management. Evacuees' departure time choice, destination choice and route choice behavior based on real-time traffic information are three crucial factors used to estimate evacuation clearance time. In this paper, we use the orthogonal experimental design method to determine values of these three factors simultaneously, which can reduce evacuation clearance time significantly. Once we obtain these values, we can guide evacuees' departure time choice, destination choice and route choice behavior to approximate these values and evacuation efficiency will improve greatly. The dynamic traffic evacuation process is modeled using a rule-based multi-agent microscopic traffic simulation system called TransWorld. The simulation experiment results illustrate the effectiveness and reliability of the proposed method. The proposed methodology, computational results and discussions can be used for future emergency evacuation planning and management.