Transportation evacuation strategies based on VANET disaster management system

The September 2001 attacks and the 2011 Japan earthquake and tsunami disaster are examples of manmade and natural disasters which have revealed the importance of having a disaster management system in place. A great deal of advisory and policy documents need to be developed by various government authorities. The Intelligent Transportation Systems and Services (ITSS) are set to play a crucial role in responding to emergencies and large-scale disasters. In previous works, we have proposed and evaluated an intelligent disaster management system based on the emerging ICT technologies such as Vehicular Ad hoc Networks (VANETs) and Cloud Computing with a focus on transportation in urban environments. Also, we have developed a tool to examine previous proposed intelligent system performance in improving the transportation evacuation strategies, and Demand Strategy (DS) has been shown as one of the various evacuation strategies to measure the improvements. In this paper, we applied and evaluated another transportation evacuation strategy called Speed Strategy (SS), independently for traffic network. In addition, the driver response to the emergency situations and their behaviors in travel choices may be difficult to quantify theoretically, however, driver response to evacuation pre-plans is part of the tool design and we present the importance of this factor through various evacuation strategies

A smart disaster management system for future cities

Smart cities have recently become the mainstream approaches for urbanisation. Environmental, social and economic sustainability, digital inclusion and high quality of life are considered important elements in smart cities design. Emergency response system and resilience are among the most crucial dimensions of smart and future cities design due to the increase in various disruptions caused by frequent manmade and natural disasters such as September 2001 and Philippines Typhoon Haiyan 2013. Disasters cause great economic and human losses each year throughout the world. Transportations and Telecommunications play a crucial role in disaster response and management. Our research is focused on developing emergency response systems for disasters of various scales with a focus on transportation systems. We have proposed and evaluated a disaster management system that uses Intelligent Transportation Systems including Vehicular Ad hoc Networks (VANETs), mobile and Cloud Computing technologies. In this paper, we report our recent work on two major evacuation strategies, Demand Strategies (DS) and Speed Strategies (SS), which provide better evacuation results in smart cities settings