Network Traffic Management

Natural or man-made, disasters have been a major concern to humanity and a threat to our lives. Management of traffic is very critical during disasters, as accessibility to and mobility in a disaster region can directly affect the level of success in dealing with it. Among many tasks of disaster traffic management, evacuation traffic management is singled out as a major one due to extreme demand levels potentially causing congestion and even gridlocks in a network, if not handled properly. This book includes a thorough review of the literature for both evacuation models and related studies to develop a general evacuation traffic management methodology that outlines major steps and management options for evacuation planning. For supply management, capacity reversibility (also known as ¿contraflow¿) is proposed on congested evacuation routes. Demand management actions include departure and destination choice optimization and evacuation zone scheduling. Both options are studied analytically for optimal traffic assignment principles, as well as heuristically for computationally less demanding approaches suitable for large urban networks.