Clustering Approach for Defining Hurricane Evacuation Zones
Publication: Journal of Urban Planning and Development
Volume 142, Issue 4
Abstract
In the aftermath of recent hurricanes, many people either died or were stranded in the affected areas due to lack of time for evacuation caused by traffic congestion on evacuation routes. The main sources of traffic congestion are the unnecessary evacuation of the areas located outside evacuation zones as well as early evacuation of the less dangerous areas. In this paper, a set of evacuation zones is defined to prioritize the evacuation based on the danger level in the impact areas during a hurricane landfall. A clustering analysis approach is used to formulate this problem and is solved using dynamic programming. The proposed approach is examined on a case study in Harrison County, Mississippi, to prove its applicability.
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Acknowledgments
The authors wish to acknowledge Dr. Muhammad Akbar from the Northrop Grumman Center for High Performance Computing in Jackson State University for running WRF and ADCIRC, and CaMEL for providing the Harrison County flood elevation and wind speed data.
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Published In
Journal of Urban Planning and Development
Volume 142 • Issue 4 • December 2016
Copyright
© 2016 American Society of Civil Engineers.
History
Received: Mar 16, 2015
Accepted: Nov 3, 2015
Published online: Mar 17, 2016
Discussion open until: Aug 17, 2016
Published in print: Dec 1, 2016
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