Critical Intersection Signal Optimization During Urban Evacuation Utilizing Dynamic Programming

Abstract

Despite advancements in the field of traffic planning and operations, many major cities still rely on pretimed signal settings. With only pretimed signal control strategies, the secondary effects of a terror attack are magnified by slow evacuation times resulting in further loss of life. However, the cost of implementing new infrastructure based solely on the chance of a no-notice evacuation is not something that city planners are willing to do. The purpose of the research is to define a cost-effective methodology to develop pretimed signal control strategies to assist evacuations in urban areas. To that end, a dynamic programming methodology was developed to assist critical intersections in urban corridors. To test this methodology, a microscopic traffic-simulation environment was created for a case study of a 10 intersection evacuation corridor in Washington, DC. Using the proposed methodology to optimizing signal splits of a critical intersection within an evacuation corridor, evacuation clearance time was reduced by approximately 1 h. Furthermore, this formulation can be used to develop pretimed signal control settings for evacuation scenarios. Results showed that peak-hour signal timings are not sufficient in the case of an emergency, and signal timing plans must be tailored for emergency evacuation.

Emergency Evacuation Simulation and Management Optimization in Urban Residential Communities

“…In general, an emergency evacuation can be considered as a traditional routing problem. Many improved classical algorithms have been proposed to solve this problem, for example, Depth-First-Search algorithm [6], dynamic programming [7], Dijkstra's algorithm [8] and ant colony optimization [9]. However, human evacuation is a complex process.…”

An integrated bus - based routing and dispatching approach for flood evacuation

“…The study of Taaffe et al, [27], considers a significant role of internet and mobile phone facility for providing communication for the right time to exit and take a route during the evacuation. The special signal timings, suggested by Chien et al, [8]; Parr and Kaiser [18], for managing the vehicles flow, can be effective for executing the evacuation in a smooth manner. Apart from this, to avoid traffic congestion, a crowded hour should be the refrain for evacuation.…”

Route-Based Signal Preemption Control of Emergency Vehicle

“…The number of social vehicles includes the vehicles entering in the system from the cross road of evacuation route and passing through intersections and the vehicles passing through intersections in the direction of the evacuation route of EV. Equation (29) ensures that the real start time of green signal of intersection is between ( ) and ( ); (30) represents the arrival time of EV at intersection ; (31) represents the time needed to clear the queued vehicles before EV arrives; (32) denotes the calculation methd of the queued vehicles at intersection at the moment the green signal is starting, and , = 1, 2, . .…”

“…Many scholars have intensively studied the shortest path problems of road network with traffic restrictions [18][19][20][21][22][23]. Various techniques have been proposed to eliminate certain turning and crossing maneuvers at intersections so as to obtain evacuation routes that can provide continuous traffic flow and reduce accidents [24][25][26][27][28][29][30]. There also has been a considerable amount of evacuation route works that consider delay and capacity of intersections [31,32].…”