2025 PSR UTC Annual Congress

Designing Evacuation Routes Considering Risk and Clearance Times - This paper introduces a method for designing evacuation plans considering wildfire risks to minimize clearance time and the resources used, e.g. road network corridors. The study considers wildfire risks resulting from historical event information, populations’ social vulnerability, and the road network's topological characteristics. The methodology combines mathematical programming optimization models and risk assessment. The main data sources include OpenStreetMap (OSM), the American Community Survey (ACS), and the National Risk Index (NRI). Furthermore, the study uses fire projections from a specific case study to evaluate evacuation performance. The methodology estimates the clearance time for evacuation, measures the risk perceived by evacuees from potential wildfires, and evaluates the expected efficiency of the evacuation during different scenarios, including a real-life wildfire event. Our results demonstrate the need to identify alternative or supportive strategies to evacuation in scenarios of no or short notice when a city's current capacity cannot effectively manage evacuation during a wildfire.