Managing Emergency Traffic Evacuation with a Partially Random Destination Allocation Strategy: A Computational-Experiment-Based Optimization Approach

Natural or man-made disasters can cause huge losses of human life and property. One of the effective and widely used response and mitigation strategies for these disasters is traffic evacuation. Evacuation destination choice is critical in evacuation traffic planning and management. In this paper, we propose a partially random destination allocation strategy for evacuation management. We present a metamodel-based simulation optimization method to design the strategy. The proposed method uses a quadratic polynomial as a metamodel, within which a degree-free trust region algorithm is developed to solve the proposed model. The performance of the proposed method is evaluated based on a subnetwork of Beijing with two different traffic demands. Computational experiments demonstrate that the proposed method can yield a well-performed strategy, leading to reduced network clearance times.