Operative travel demand management in the case of evacuations and extraordinary events on a transport network

Abstract

The base of emergency situation management is a satisfactory information source. The operative center of a traffic police department has basically three ways to gather information about emergency situations: emergency call (which must be verified by police patrol), personal familiarity with the territory (which is highly unlikely) and digital maps. It is obvious that digital maps are the first line of information, and as such, must have maximal efficiency. This paper explains such an information system, which provides aggregate information about an area of interest. The most important information is traffic intensity, capacity of roads, road closures and road limitations (like wide, carrying capacity of the bridge), etc. With these data, the information system can offer detours, with computed travel times. The operations officer can choose one of the offered detours, or only use additional information for his own solution.