Fast Transportation in a Disaster Situation along Real-Life Grid-Structured Road Networks

We address the problem of evacuation of people in a natural disaster or some other emergency situations. In such a scenario, traffic from different parts of a city start moving simultaneously towards the nearest safe location. We propose here an optimal traffic routing algorithm in an 'almost' grid-structured network in a city to reach the safe location in minimum time, which is based on a novel technique of successively partitioning the network in suitable sub-networks to tackle the issue of missing links in the grid. Simulation results with the road network of Manhattan city show that our proposed technique performs better in terms of average time to reach the evacuation center than any of the existing techniques.