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Identifying Critical Corridors During an Area-Wide Disruption by Evaluating Network Bottleneck Capacity
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- Author(s) / Creator(s)
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This paper applies the min-cut max-flow theorem combined with a grid cell disruption method over a large transportation network, to identify the importance of network locations in providing travel capacity when a community is evacuating (say, from wildfire). We develop metrices that look at the importance and contribution of individual links to network bottleneck capacity in traveling from the evacuating community to the shelter community. The purpose of this is to determine the network location that is the most restrictive of all, and more importantly, where it is in reference to the evacuating community location. We apply this method to the highway network of Alberta, Canada, with evacuating communities identified as those that have been under wildfire threat historically and/or are expected to in the future. We find that in all cases, network locations that contribute the greatest share of bottleneck capacity, are located adjacent to these evacuating communities. Next, we look at combining the measure for several communities, finding that the highways in remote northern Alberta are important despite some of them having lower capacity than the multi-lane highways in the south. Application of this simple method can support provincial and local municipal governments in deciding which communities require more detailed emergency evacuation studies to better identify and communicate transportation network deficiencies to provincial and federal bodies that would be making infrastructure investments towards community health and resilience.
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- Date created
- 2021-07-24
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- Subjects / Keywords
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- Type of Item
- Article (Draft / Submitted)