********************************************************************

                                                         Seminar
             Department of Systems Engineering and Engineering Management
                                  The Chinese University of Hong Kong

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

 

 

 

Title

:

Modeling the Use of Public Transport in Evacuations

 

 

 

Speaker

:

Prof. Mark Hickman

 

 

Department of Civil Engineering and Engineering Mechanics

 

 

The University of Arizona

 

 

 

Date

:

May 18th, 2007 (Friday)

 

 

 

Time

:

4:30 p.m. - 5:30 p.m.

 

 

 

Venue

:

Room 513

 

 

William M.W. Mong Engineering Building

 

 

(Engineering Building Complex Phase 2)

 

 

CUHK

 

 

 

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Abstract:
 

Recent events have highlighted the role that public transport can play in responding to major emergencies, particularly in the US. In many cases, public transport can be used to help evacuate people from the emergency. Public transport offers a much higher person flow rate than private cars, and offers a critical form of transportation for those who do not have a car (the “carless”). Better planning of public transport services before an emergency, and better execution of those plans during the emergency, could greatly increase the number of people evacuated.

 

During such events, the primary need is to evacuate persons from the area near the emergency to designated safe locations. In this presentation, we investigate two critical aspects of emergency evacuation: the location of evacuation sites for the carless population, and the dynamic routing of public buses to evacuate these people. The first problem is to determine the location of evacuation sites where persons may congregate to be picked up by transit vehicles. In our decomposition, the selection of evacuation sites is completed a priori, before any emergency. This selection of evacuation sites is formulated as a capacitated facility location problem, which can be solved using existing heuristic methods. By considering the time of day and day of week of the emergency, the model identifies the evacuation sites and gives the expected number of evacuees that need public transit service at each site.

 

The second problem is to route the public transit vehicles to pick up evacuees at these sites and to transport them to safe locations. The objective of the problem depends on the nature of the emergency: in some cases, the objective will be to maximize the number of people evacuated in a given time window; in other cases, the objective will be to minimize the total time to complete the evacuation. Some buses may be available for the evacuation from a depot, and others may be already in service. We may also have real-time information on the locations and remaining capacities of vehicles in service, and/or real-time information on the travel times in the road network. With this information, the goal is to route the set of vehicles through the network to evacuate people from the evacuation sites to designated safe locations. The routing strategies are adaptive and sensitive to several characteristics: the time at which the emergency occurs, the condition of the road network, and the number of people that need to be evacuated at each evacuation site. We formulate this problem as a dynamic vehicle routing problem, and discuss possible heuristic methods for its solution. We will also discuss possible extensions of this problem, in which the demand at each evacuation site is stochastic.


-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Biography:
 

Dr. Mark Hickman is an associate professor in transportation engineering within the Department of Civil Engineering and Engineering Mechanics at the University of Arizona. He was recently named to the Delbert Lewis ’51 Professorship in the department, for the period 2005-2008. He also holds a joint appointment with the Department of Systems and Industrial Engineering. Currently, he is a visiting Associate Professor at the Hong Kong Polytechnic University.

 

At the University of Arizona, Dr. Hickman has taught courses and performed research in public transit planning and operations, urban transportation planning and travel demand modeling, and traffic engineering. He specializes in applying operations research methods to these areas. Dr. Hickman previously was an assistant professor at Texas A&M University, a post-doctoral research engineer at the University of California – Berkeley, and a consultant with the transportation practice at Charles River Associates. Dr. Hickman earned his PhD from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.


************************* ALL ARE WELCOME ************************

 

 

 

Host

:

Prof. Janny Leung

Tel

:

(852) 2609-8238

Email

:

janny@se.cuhk.edu.hk

 

 

 

Enquiries

:

Bolin Ding or Jeffrey Xu Yu

 

:

Department of Systems Engineering and Engineering Management

 

 

CUHK

Website

:

http://www.se.cuhk.edu.hk/~seg5810

Email

:

seg5810@se.cuhk.edu.hk

 

 

 

********************************************************************