A comparative study of communication methods for evacuation guidance systems in disaster situations

Abstract

This paper describes communication methods for evacuation guidance systems in disaster areas. Because network availability depends on the damage situation in disaster areas, three types of communication methods are presented to deal with various evacuation situations: the infrastructure, ad-hoc and hybrid methods. We conduct simulation experiments to compare these communication methods from the viewpoint of sharing information on road conditions among evacuees in disaster areas. Experimental results reveal that the ad-hoc method achieves about 90% the performance of the infrastructure method and thus can be an alternative when communication infrastructure has been damaged or malfunctioned. We also show that the hybrid method obtains results that are almost as good as the optimal results.