How can the risk be reduced by employing urban evacuation? How can transport system models interact with emerging ICT to
support evacuation? How can citizens become a key part of the overall process? How to provide to the evacuees the best social
knowledge about safe destinations and routes to increase recovery? How may benefit be re-defined by considering the reduction of
evacuation times, or the increasing number of evacuees?
The research project RISK, attempting to respond to the questions mentioned above, aims in all its phases to increase collective
interest by increasing resilience and mainly following recovery for social risks.
Two Research Units will carry out the project. UNIRC will work on risk and travel demand models to estimate the risk reduction (by
exposure) and to forecast route choices and utilities for evacuees in presence of emergent ICT (e.g. Internet of Things, IoT) after that
a dangerous event, whose effects involve a portion of a town, occurs. UNICAL will develop a Digital Twin (DT) to forecast travel costs
(disutilities) updated on the network (by IoT), once the event has occurred.
The project consists in four main activities. The first activity concerns the state of the art of the theoretical and experimental results
available in the literature, for the two working areas (models, emerging ICT) on which the Research Units are engaged. The second
activity concerns methods to be used a-priori for the development of the architecture of the models. The output will be the
forecasted attributes on travel demand (forecasted evacuees’ route choices) and network (forecasted travel times, flows) and the DT
architecture. The third activity will concern the experimentation, testing and evaluation of the models and the DT, by means of a lab
survey of a sample of evacuees inside a portion of a selected town introducing the information given by IoT. The output will be represented by the experienced attributes on demand (experienced evacuees’ route choices) and on network (experienced travel
times, flows) and the validation of models. The fourth activity will concern the results analysis by comparing the forecasted vs.
experienced demand and network attributes. The results will be delivered to public administration and private potential
stakeholders, who work on evacuation planning.