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May 2006
Evacuation project wins award
According to University research, walking may be faster than driving in emergency evacuations of a mile or less. Shashi Shekhar, one of the recipients of this year’s Research Partnership Award (RPA), explained his team’s findings at the CTS Annual Meeting and Awards Luncheon, held in Minneapolis April 18.
Shashi Shekhar, Daryl Taavola, Erik Seiberlich,
Sonia Morphew,
Cathy Clark,
Betsy George, Sangho Kim,
Laurie McGinnis, Robert Vasek
The winning project, “Metro Evacuation Traffic Management Plan,” developed a system to coordinate local emergency evacuation plans in multiple communities. The system would minimize potential congestion on major roadways, speed up the evacuation process, and maximize safety for citizens.
CTS associate director Laurie McGinnis began the presentation by introducing Sonia Morphew of Mn/DOT, another project partner. Seventy public and private agencies in the nine-county metro area were invited to create the plan, Morphew said, including transportation, fire, law enforcement, and emergency management officials. A key component of the project was Shekhar’s routing software, she said, the “first we’ve come across that runs in minutes instead of hours or days. During an evacuation, [these are] hours or days we don’t have.”
Shekhar, a professor in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering, explained that the goal of his research team was to create a tool that would run more efficiently than the standard programming approach and allow users—such as transportation professionals and first responders—to quickly find the best escape routes, even for large scenarios.
The result of the team’s work is a system with a simple, Web-based user interface. “With about three to four clicks,” he said, “people can get evacuation routes.” Mn/DOT has already used the algorithm to develop a metro evacuation traffic management plan for the Twin Cities area.
Shekhar then shared insights gained during system development. First, the researchers found that a walking-based evacuation in a one-mile area is roughly three times faster than driving on congested roads. “This is a really new insight from this software and project,” he said. Also, the research found different evacuation needs for day and night due to work-related population shifts.
Based on the findings, Shekhar recommended that policymakers consider adding extra capacity, especially more lanes and walkways in key bottleneck areas of the transportation network.
To test the new system, Shekhar ran a comparison with the existing evacuation plan for the nuclear plant near Monticello. Evacuation time is about 30 percent faster with the new tool, he said, and computation time falls from 268 to 162 minutes.
The research partnership was very useful for shaping the project and focusing the work, Shekhar concluded. Future work may include adding modes such as transit and bicycling to the algorithm. (learn more about the project, see the CTS Research)
Project partners included:
- Shashi Shekhar, Qingsong Lu, Sanhgo Kim, and Betsy George (Department of Computer Science and Engineering)
- Sonia Morphew, Cathy Clark, and Robert Vasek (Mn/DOT)
- Daryl Taavola and Erik Seiberlich (URS Corporation)
A subcommittee of the CTS Eduction/Outreach Council selected the award recipient, as well as a second project for special partnership recognition. The second project and its partners were:
“Development, Testing, and Implementation of the Minnesota Accelerated Load Testing Facility (Minne-ALF) for Pavements”
- Tom Burnham and Doug Schwartz (Mn/DOT)
- Mark B. Snyder (independent consulting engineer)
- Dave Rettner and Rebecca Embacher (American Engineering Testing)
- Arturo Schultz and Lev Khazanovich (Department of Civil Engineering)
- Bill Lohr (Federal Highway Administration)