Effects of Connected and Autonomous Vehicles on Contraflow Operations for Emergency Evacuation: a Microsimulation Study

Efficient and effective emergency evacuation depends primarily on the transportation infrastructure. Time sensitive evacuation operations can place significant demand on the evacuation routes, and authorities deploy the best possible emergency evacuation plans to evacuate maximum amount of traffic in an efficient manner. One such evacuation technique employed by different state agencies is contraflow evacuation. Connected and Autonomous Vehicle (CAV) technologies, equipped with vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) or vehicle-to-infrastructure (V2I) communications, can be very effective to improve overall traffic operations in a unique evacuation operation such as contraflow. This study presents a comprehensive assessment of the contraflow evacuation operation in CAV environment for I-10, which is one of the major evacuation routes in the State of Florida. The microsimulation software VISSIM was used to model the roadway network. Evacuation traffic data was collected from previous FDOT studies. A customized external driver model was developed for the CAV with automated longitudinal control to be used in VISSIM. System performance was evaluated for different market penetration rates (MPRs) of CAVs. This study found significant improvements in system performance for contraflow operations with the presence of CAVs in evacuation traffic. The results showed significant reduction in total delays and travel times for the overall evacuation route and significant increase in evacuation speeds when CAVs were at least 30% of the total traffic. It concludes that higher percentages of CAVs contribute to efficient operational performance and fast evacuation during a contraflow operation.

• Supplemental Notes:
  • This paper was sponsored by TRB committee AHB15 Standing Committee on Intelligent Transportation Systems.
• Authors:
  • Ekram, Al-Ahad
  • Rahman, Md Sharikur
• Conference:
  • Transportation Research Board 97th Annual Meeting
  • Location: Washington DC, United States
  • Date: 2018-1-7 to 2018-1-11
• Date: 2018

Language

• English

Media Info

• Media Type: Digital/other
• Features: Figures; References; Tables;
• Pagination: 8p

Subject/Index Terms

• TRT Terms: Connected vehicles; Contraflow lanes; Evacuation; Intelligent vehicles; Microsimulation
• Identifier Terms: VISSIM (Computer model)
• Geographic Terms: Florida
• Subject Areas: Highways; Operations and Traffic Management; Security and Emergencies;

Filing Info

• Accession Number: 01660459
• Record Type: Publication
• Report/Paper Numbers: 18-06791
• Files: TRIS, TRB, ATRI
• Created Date: Feb 20 2018 9:28AM