Evacuation Traffic Management under Low Visibility and Toxic-Gas Leakage Disasters

Abstract

The majority of existing evacuation models neglect the fact that leaking toxic gas usually degrades atmospheric visibility under chemical disasters. This paper takes the impact of leaking toxic gas on atmospheric visibility into account in evacuation problems. The reduction of traffic speed and road capacity under conditions of low atmospheric visibility is introduced and has stochastic features. Further, a robust evacuation traffic management model for evacuation scenarios of low visibility and toxic-gas-leakage disasters is developed to obtain optimal evacuation plans. The proposed robust optimization model can guarantee the feasibility of optimal evacuation plans to the evacuation scenarios of low atmospheric visibility under corresponding robustness requirements. Numerical experiments show that neglecting the impact of low atmospheric visibility overestimates the performance of optimal evacuation plans and even assigns evacuation traffic to roads with bad driving conditions under chemical disasters.