 Leveraging social networks for efficient hurricane evacuationManini Madireddy, Soundar Kumara, D.J. Medeiros and Venky N. Shankar Transportation Research Part B: Methodological, 2015, vol. 77, issue C, 199-212 Abstract: One of the important factors affecting evacuation performance is the departure time choices made by evacuees. Simultaneous departures of evacuees can lead to overloading of road networks causing congestion. We are especially interested in cases when evacuees subject to little or no risk of exposure evacuate along with evacuees subject to higher risk of threat (also known as shadow evacuation). One of the reasons for correlated evacuee departures is higher perceived risk of threat spread through social contacts. In this work, we study an evacuation scenario consisting of a high risk region and a surrounding low risk area. We propose a probabilistic evacuee departure time model incorporating both evacuee individual characteristics and the underlying evacuee social network. We find that the performance of an evacuation process can be improved by forcing a small subset of evacuees (inhibitors) in the low risk area to delay their departure. The performance of an evacuation is measured by both average travel time of the population and total evacuation time of the high risk evacuees. We derive closed form expressions for average travel time for ER random network. A detailed experimental analysis of various inhibitor selection strategies and their effectiveness on different social network topologies and risk distribution is performed. Results indicate that significant improvement in evacuation performance can be achieved in scenarios where evacuee social networks have short average path lengths and topologically influential evacuees do not belong to the high risk regions. Additionally, communities with stronger ties improve evacuation performance. Keywords: Evacuation; Congestion; Social networks; Diffusion; Shadow evacuation; Departure time choice Models (search for similar items in EconPapers) Downloads: (external link) Related works: Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:transb:v:77:y:2015:i:c:p:199-212 Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from DOI: 10.1016/j.trb.2015.03.016 Access Statistics for this article Transportation Research Part B: Methodological is currently edited by Fred Mannering More articles in Transportation Research Part B: Methodological from Elsevier |
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