Carleton University - School of Computer Science Honours Project
Winter 2021
THE DESIGN AND ANALYSIS OF CITY EVACUATION SIMULATIONS
ABSTRACT
The following report is on the topic of a discrete event simulated (DES)
evacuation router. The thesis consists of two portions, a theoretical component, and an
applied component. The applied component is producing viable evacuation simulations
for small-sized remote Canadian communities in a real-time disaster. Communities
targeted are to be roughly in the population range from a couple hundred to a couple
thousand and disconnected from other nearby settlements by a large open area of land.
The application itself centers mainly on routing and computation geometric analysis and
simplifies physical-geographical details. The application seeks to produce a visual
awareness of the logistics required for an evacuation during a real-time disaster that
emergency responders could use. The program developed uses and builds upon
previously developed algorithmic approaches to this problem, with the application, in
particular, is designed for visual representation in an application-based environment.
The theoretical component focuses mainly on the mathematical models and algorithmic
tools used to design a simulation of this type. The thesis was solved using the
minimum-cost minimum-flow algorithm on the graph space defined by the user, and the
A* algorithm was used to find the minimum paths between the exit vertex and the
population centres. The results of the experiments were positive, as a simulation was
successfully built to showcase the primary results of the methods above.