Finding Safe Routes in Wildfire Evacuation

Keywords: network routing, python, hazards, evacuation routing, GIScience, shortest path, transportation, road network
Abstract Type: Poster Abstract

Abstract

Wildfires are becoming increasingly problematic throughout the western United States, showing an upward trend in fire activity since 1984. To combat increased records of injury and death in the United States, emergency evacuation has become the preferred action taken by emergency responders during significant disasters. As the growth of a wildfire increases, smoke formation follows, road visibility reduces, and the evacuee's driving behavior is affected. When driving behavior is affected, the evacuee may lose situational awareness. When evacuees lose situational awareness in a road network, they frequently rely on way-finding applications to route them to a safe destination. Most way-finding applications calculate routes using the shortest path algorithm, as the shortest path is assumed to be the quickest and therefore most desired. In the case of emergency wildfire evacuation, the shortest path may not always be the safest. In this research, an alternate algorithm is developed that routes evacuees along a complex road network to a destination location while keeping them the furthest distance away from the wildfire risk. The output algorithm is translated into a user-friendly routing tool that is designed to perform within a mobile application.