Travel Route Planning Under Flood Inundation Conditions
Abstract
Finding optimal vehicle routes, considering travel time and safety, under anomalous conditions, such as flooding, is of extreme importance to many, including people in and around affected areas, emergency managers, and utility operators who have to deploy rescue and retrieval crews, repair crews, equipment, etc. On average, the U.S faces more than 3000 flash floods per year. Floods are the leading cause of weather-related deaths in the U.S.; about 63% of the fatalities during floods are associated with vehicles. Floods are also associated with substantial economic losses due to traffic delays and vehicle damage. Furthermore, the frequency of floods and their impacts are rapidly increasing due to factors such as urbanization, population growth, and climate change.
This work addresses the problem of vehicle route planning and operation under flood conditions by considering inundation estimates and their effects on road conditions and travel speeds during pre-flooding, flooding and post-flooding phases. A suite of models that integrate weather and precipitation forecasts, hydrologic flow simulations and stormwater routing is used to forecast spatio-temporal inundation levels, which are then used to forecast travel speeds on the road network. The spatiotemporal forecasts of road speeds are used by a routing algorithm that considers time-dependent travel times to identify optimal travel route alternatives between any origin-destination pair and for different trip start times. This procedure is extended to consider forecast uncertainties and their effects on road travel-speed variabilities, and generate a set of efficient routes that represent the tradeoff between minimizing expected route travel times and minimizing variability in route travel times, i.e., risk of delays.- Publication:
-
AGU Fall Meeting Abstracts
- Pub Date:
- December 2022
- Bibcode:
- 2022AGUFM.H54F..07D