Dynamic Routing during Disaster Events

Innovations in mobile technology allow people to request route information on their smartphone to reach safe areas during emergency and disaster evacuations. In return, the affected people in the field can send their observation reports, e.g. using a dedicated icon-based disaster language. However, given the turbulent nature of disaster situations, the people and systems at crisis center are subjected to information overload, which can obstruct timely and accurate information sharing. A dynamic and automated evacuation plan that is able to predict future disaster outcome can be used to coordinate the affected people to safety in times of crisis. In this paper, we present a dynamic version of the shortest path algorithm of Dijkstra. The algorithm is able to compute the shortest path from the GPS-based location of the user (sent by the smartphone) to the safety area by taking into account possible affected areas in future. In the case of a toxic cloud, the “plume” model has been used to predict the path of the “plume” and to compute affected areas in the future. The algorithm has been tested in a simulation study and used in an experiment during a simulated crisis event in the city of Rotterdam