Carleton University - School of Computer Science Honours Project
Winter 2021
THE DESIGN AND ANALYSIS OF CITY EVACUATION SIMULATIONS
Connor Stewart
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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.