-
Department Info
-
-
Admissions
-
-
Academics
-
-
-
Research
-
-
-
Main navigation | Main content
Anyone who remembers the news stories covering the evacuation of New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina could attest to the importance in evacuation planning for a disaster. Professor Shashi Shekhar and his research group are actively studying how we can make that process easier.
This project came from Professor Shekhar’s earlier research in routing, which involves mapping and GIS. After the 9/11 attacks, it became clear to him and to other people in disaster planning that advanced planning was needed to consider moving tens of thousands of people out of a densely populated area.
One of these techniques is the Capacity Constrained Route Planner (CCRP) algorithm. Anyone who has tried to exit a crowded parking ramp after a stadium game (and who has seen pedestrians making better progress across town than their car) can attest to the congestion that happens when large groups of people try to move in one direction. That’s where the CCRP algorithm can help. Professor Shekhar’s laboratory experiments and field use in the Twin Cities for disaster scenarios show that CCRP is much faster than other computations. One of the key findings in these computations is that by walking the first mile to exit a disaster area, we can speed-up evacuation by a factor of 2 to 3. The CCRP also suggests multiple routes and an evacuation schedule in order to limit traffic congestion, which can speed up evacuation times.
Read more about the Shekhar team’s research at: A Scientific Approach to Evacuation Planning.
