Speaker: Dr. Lakshay Taneja, Robert Bosch.
Title: Efficient Evacuation Planning for Emergency Response
Date and Time: Monday, 3rd February 2020, 10 a.m.
Venue: Seminar Room, 2nd Floor, IEOR Building
Abstract:
Due to the frequent occurrence of disasters worldwide, an evacuation is no longer a rare event. Planning for evacuation is an important step in emergency response management. Evacuation is inherently a complex interactive transportation process. During an evacuation, there is a simultaneous movement of people from a dangerous location to a place of relative safety. Due to this simultaneous movement, available capacity (of roadway/pathway) may become scarce and may result in a significant level of congestion, thus causing a delay. This delay can be disastrous. Accordingly, a sound balance between increased demand due to evacuation and the available network supply is required. For this, it is important to know how the evacuation process will evolve and the ways in which it can be made efficient. In this seminar, various evacuation strategies (to make the evacuation process efficient) are presented.
During an evacuation, people may evacuate by car, foot, or by public transit depending on the distance that needs to be evacuated to reach a safe place. The area that needs to be evacuated generally depends upon the type of emergency. Accordingly, four variants of problems are presented in the context of "Evacuation Planning for Emergency Response" including route choice and handling uncertainty.
Mathematical models have been developed for optimal decision making and analysis of the effect of these strategies over the evacuation process. Various heuristics have also been proposed to make models computationally tractable and then provide timely and robust results during actual emergencies in an acceptable time. Further, efforts have been made to make the models close to reality and applied to different case studies.
About the Speaker:
Lakshay is working as Research Scientist at Robert Bosch in the field of Smart Cities. He has a keen research interest in the area of applied mathematical modeling and simulation. In particular, he has been focusing on problems around transportation for emergency evacuation and has recently initiated work on problems around smart mobility. His current research team at Bosch is working on developing city-wide traffic simulation models to implement control strategies for reducing traffic congestion in cities. The aim is to find solutions to enable new mobility models based on shared assets and traffic flow optimization. During his Ph.D., he has worked in the area of emergency management. His Ph.D. thesis at IIT Delhi involves transportation network and routing problems, specifically oriented towards evacuation planning.