Simulation-based Evacuation Planning for Urban Areas

Evacuation planning is a critical task in disaster management. Especially in situations such as natural disasters or terrorist attacks, large crowds need to move away from danger and reach designated safe zones. For this purpose, various approaches that efficiently compute evacuation plans in urban areas have been proposed. To evaluate the computed plans, previous works employ heuristics that can only roughly estimate the egress time of each plan. Intuitively, a much better approach is to estimate the egress time via simulation. However, designing a simulation model is usually a time-consuming task and, what is more, this model can only be used to evaluate evacuation plans for a specific area. In this paper, we address these issues presenting EURASIM. Our system enables the automated generation of simulation models for urban areas. Furthermore, EURASIM is designed in a way that algorithms for evacuation planning can be easily integrated, thus functioning as a testbed for the development of even better solutions.