Use of Data Mining in Emergency Evacuation Planning
Evacuating large numbers of people during a natural disaster or terrorist attack is a vital challenge for emergency management professionals. This is even a continuous pressure on the management in the hurricane zones. Hurricanes Katrina and Rita vividly illustrated this problem. Miles-long traffic jams on the highways during any evacuation in Louisiana and Texas expose the limitations of the regional transportation network and the inadequacy of evacuation route planning. A good plan should be designed to allow comprehensive evacuation planning studies including estimates of evacuation times, development of traffic management and control strategies, identification of evacuation routes, and traffic control points and other elements of an evacuation plan.