ARTERIAL SIGNAL OPTIMIZATION FOR EMERGENCY EVACUATION

This paper presents a mixed-integer model for design of arterial signal control strategies during emergency evacuation. The proposed model can effectively take into account various complex operational issues such as critical intersection selection, demand rerouting, and signal timing. The control objective is to maximize the efficiency of the primary evacuation arterial, but not incur excessive waiting time and queues on its side streets. To evaluate the effectiveness of the proposed model under various demand levels and control objectives, this study has employed one major evacuation corridor in Washington D.C. as the target route for numerical experiments. The results of extensive simulation experiments reveal that the proposed method for signal optimization offers the potential for real-world applications.