Buffering in evacuation management for optimal traffic demand distribution

This paper presents a new framework for managing congestion during emergency evacuations. The algorithm allows a long link of the network to be used as a buffer to keep the traffic flow moving in. Concurrently, a detour trigger time is estimated to keep the traffic under‐saturated in the buffer zone and minimize the total travel time. The integration algorithm presented in this paper is an efficient mathematical solution for travel time cost calculation. A case study is presented to demonstrate the efficacy of the traffic demand buffering strategy developed in this research for managing the evacuation flow.