The Role of OR in Emergency Evacuation from Hazmat Incidents

Hazardous materials incidents pose a threat to human lives and require protective actions. The appropriate response may be to shelter-in-place or evacuate, depending on the type of hazardous material and other factors. This chapter focuses on the latter response and illustrates how operations research (OR) has been used to model and simulate evacuation conditions and potential improvements to evacuation operations, guidance, and plans. These strategies include ramp management, crossing elimination, signal retiming, staged evacuation, destination and shelter assignment, and transit operations. The strategies and associated mathematical formulations build on existing models of traffic assignment and simulation systems. A discussion is presented of how to modify temporal and spatial parameters of the systems for evacuations and the hazmat event specific characteristics. Finally, the chapter presents a forward-looking discussion to examine the emerging frontiers of OR knowledge and research that is expected to one day permit ever greater complex to be dealt with.