Routing service with real world severe weather

Abstract

Traditional routing services aim to save driving time by recommending the shortest path, in terms of distance or time, to travel from a start location to a given destination. However, these methods are relatively static and to a certain extent rely on traffic patterns under relatively normal conditions to calculate and recommend an appropriate route. As such, they do not necessarily translate effectively during severe weather events such as tornadoes. In these scenarios, the guiding principal is not, optimize for travel time, but rather, optimize for survivability of the event, i.e., can we recommend an evacuation route to those users inside the hazardous areas. In this demo, we present a framework for routing services for evacuating and avoiding real world severe weather threats that is able to: (1) Identify the users inside the dangerous region of a severe weather event (2) Recommend an evacuation route to guide the users out to a safe destination or shelter (3) Assure the recommended route to be one of the shortest paths after excluding the risky area (4) Maintain the flow of traffic by normalizing the evacuation on the possible safe routes. During the demo, attendees will be able to use the system interactively through its graphical user interface within a number of different scenarios. They will be able to locate the severe weather events on real time basis in any area in USA and examine detailed information about each event, to issue an evacuation query from an existing dangerous area by identifying a destination location and receiving the routing direction on their mobile devices, to issue an avoidance routing query to ask for a shortest path that avoids the dangerous region, to have an inside look into the internal system components and finally, to evaluate the overall system performance.