Integrating Traffic Network Analysis and Communication Network Analysis at a Regional Scale to Support More Efficient Evacuation in Response to a Wildfire Event

Status

Complete

Project Timeline

July 1, 2019 - March 31, 2021

Principal Investigator

Areas of Expertise

Infrastructure Delivery, Operations, & Resilience Intelligent Transportation Systems, Emerging Technologies, & Big Data

Campus(es)

UC Berkeley

Project Summary

When an evacuation is ordered, affected families and individuals leave for safer towns nearby. Despite carefully developed residential evacuation plans in place at the local level across California, there is still a lack of efficient communications and coordination between neighboring towns at a regional scale. The difficulty of communications in complex wildfire evacuation scenarios is further compounded by the dysfunction of the Information and Communication Technology (ICT) systems, such as failure of the cell towers. This project aims to demonstrate the benefits of improved coordination at the regional level between evacuation towns and destination towns based on traffic simulations and data collected in previous field research. Researchers will develop scenarios to represent a range of possible evacuation and coordination situations. Variations in scenarios will address the available evacuation time against the speed of wildfire advancement, the implementation of counterflow, and the coordinated evacuation plan. The scenarios will include alternative communication methods among key organizations and residents of both evacuation and destination towns. Researchers will test the scenarios in the context of the Town of Bolinas, a community with similar constraints in wildfire evacuation as experienced in the Camp Fire. The scenario outcomes will be analyzed by mesoscopic regional-wide traffic models and the benefits of better coordination and other measures (e.g., counterflow on the exit routes and communication strategies) will be quantified.