A Model for Evacuation Risk Assessment on Transportation Networks

Abstract

Cities around the world are vulnerable to many kinds of disasters. Although the disaster risk reduction is widely spoken and attempted, the complex layout of cities makes the risk reduction impossible most of the times. The cannot always reach out the victims during emergencies due to the congested and concentrated network of city systems. This leads to greater vulnerability of cities and the potential increase of casualties as the hazardous consequences. The traditional transportation demand related analyses generally focus on analyzing peak travel demands on weekday morning journey to work and evening journey from work trips and provide solutions for acceptable level of service. However, it is also important to give special consideration on analyzing demand and assessing transportation system capabilities during the special events or circumstances. One of these special circumstances involves emergency evacuation. Modeling the complex spatial interactions between people and the environment that occur during an evacuation is an important need in developing a successful emergency plan. Tsunami is one of the major uncertain disasters which created a severe loss to Sri. Lanka in terms of loss of life, damages to infrastructure, and decline to the economic assets in year 2004. When the Tsunami wanting is given, the road network has to play a crucial role in responding to city's emergency evacuation. Therefore, it is essential to determine the spatial distribution of transportation difficulties and the most critical locations during the Tsunami pre-disaster situation. Hence, the evacuation risk assessment model presented in this research helps the city emergency planners to identify the most critical road segments and nodes that may hinder the efficient evaluation process because of their deficient configuration.