Leveraging e-transportation in real-time traffic evacuation management

As part of intelligent transportation systems, Internet-connected sensors and cameras have become ubiquitous along roads and highways, enabling many novel e-transportation applications. In this research, we leverage this emerging technology to improve the surface transportation aspect of homeland security, by enhancing its support for evacuation in case of terrorist attacks or other unpredictable disasters. In particular, we extend our existing work on developing a Smart Traffic Evacuation Management System (STEMS), by proposing more efficient evacuation algorithms that dynamically generate evacuation plans for both single and multiple incidents scenarios, based on real-time traffic information obtained from sensor data available through the Web. (c) 2006 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.