Large scale pedestrian evacuation modeling framework using volunteered geographical information

Abstract

With rising instances of extreme events and urban settlements, this paper outlines a pedestrian evacuation modeling framework using volunteered geographical information from OpenStreetMap and simplified queuing-network model to estimate evacuation time, detect bottlenecks and test different evacuation strategies. An example case of a total city wide evacuation is presented for a selection of UK cities with similar total road surface area. Evacuation times are presented for scenarios with and without intervention, where intervention implies that densities on roads are capped to enable maximum flow, highlighting the benefit of rapid evacuation time assessment to benchmark cities.