Assisting Road Users Exposed to Nuisance Flooding

Abstract

Flooding can severely disrupt transportation systems. In many cases, flooding only results in road closures rather than neighborhood evacuation. This paper introduces a framework that provides routing assistance to vehicles exposed to flooding by identifying them based on origins, destinations, anticipated paths, and departure times. Warning messages are disseminated to vehicles not directly impacted by the flood. The framework leverages vehicle connectivity that allows the enhanced exchange of information between equipped vehicles and a traffic management center. The proposed framework is evaluated on two transportation networks based on sections of Virginia Beach, Virginia. The evaluations of the scalability to different network sizes and the sensitivity to various flood characteristics, policy-related variables, and other dependencies are performed using simulated vehicle data and hypothetical flood scenarios. The computation times depend on the network size and flood depth but have an average of 1.47 s for the most widely tested network and deepest tested flood. The framework has the potential to alleviate the impacts and inconveniences associated with nuisance flooding.