Eva495-3d: A Real-Time Optimization, Prediction and Visualization System for Evacuation Operations

This paper presents a real-time evacuation and traffic management system, named as EVA495-3D, for the Capital Beltway (I-495) in Washington (District of Columbia) area. The authors maintain that efficient real-time management and operations of a large-scale evacuation is a very challenging task due to limited detection coverage, lack of reliable prediction of future traffic conditions, complexity of integrating all traffic control strategies, and execution speed of simulating a large traffic network. The goal of the EVA495-3D system is to assist traffic operators and engineers during the real-time evacuation operations. The authors present a case study that demonstrates how the nine principal system modules function during a simulated attack in I-495 area. The proposed system concurrently collects and predicts future traffic conditions with the data processing module and estimation and prediction module, identifies and optimizes evacuation management strategies with the optimization module, decomposes the network and simulates current and future traffic conditions with the network decomposition module and the simulation module, and illustrates the organized system output to evacuation operators with its output module that supports advanced 3D visualization function.