A Study on the Planning of Rescue and Evacuation Routes after Earthquake in Taipei City

A Study on the Planning of Rescue and Evacuation Routes after Earthquake in Taipei City

Since the impact of an earthquake can not be predicted, the performance and seismic safety of roads and bridges should be evaluated in probabilistic sense. It is desirable to minimize the expected travel time of rescue vehicles in order to reduce casualties. The seismic safety performance index is defined and expressed as a function of damage-state-probability of the road segment, over-pass Bridge and adjacent elevated highway, when they are subjected to earthquake excitation. The expected velocity of rescue vehicles on each road segment after earthquake is, in turn, related to the width, the seismic safety performance index, and the design velocity of the road segment. The ground motion intensity, soil liquefaction potential, damage-state-probability of bridges and elevated highways, etc are evaluated by Taiwan Earthquake Loss Estimation System(TELES). An analysis highway network is established and some of the intersections in each district are chosen as important nodes in the rescue network. Then, the Dijkstra algorithm is applied to identify the minimum travel-time path. Although the study region is Taipei City, the proposed method can be applied in other metropolitan areas to plan rescue routes.