Public Transportation System Real-Time Re-organization Due to Civil Protection Events

Abstract

The Civil Protection Department provides assistance to the population when minor or major disasters occur. These events happen without expecting and some of them could affect people using transportation system. Examples of these types of events are: car crashes, explosions, or some kind of accident on the road, among many others. That is why, transportation systems need to consider these types of events to guarantee physical integrity of users. In these cases, authorities should provide real-time solutions that may reduce affectations and keep population’s mobility inside a city. That is why, this paper presents a model for a transportation system that help users to reach their final destination when a civil protection events occur. In this model, civil protection authorities can disable a set of stations, users receive a notification and they are solicited to request for a new path recommendation. This new path will not contain any of the stations disabled. The model finds a new path recommendation using a non-dominant function trying to balance between two objectives: Minimize the total riding time and Maximize the distance of the new path stations from the civil protection event. This model was tested for the city of Poza Rica, Mexico which has 45 routes and 1024 stations. In this city, an explosion was simulated and the time to solve all users’ paths is measured. Software, that implements this model, runs on a Quad-core Intel Xeon processor 8 GB RAM OSX 10.5 computer.