SBIR Phase I: Testing computational feasibility and effectiveness of real time traffic nearcast for wildfire evacuation at the wildland urban interface

The broader/commercial impact of this Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase I project is to reduce the time for residents to evacuate to safe destinations by providing personalized evacuation guidance, resulting in lower risk to life and smoother government operations during a wildfire. Wildfires are an increasingly prevalent disaster; 50 million U.S. homes are currently in the Wildland-Urban Interface (WUI) areas. This project aims to empower residents in WUI communities by developing services that provide real-time information and personalized evacuation guidance during wildfires. Such services also supplement the actions of emergency response agencies that are often overloaded during wildfires due to resource and workforce constraints. The lessons learned through this project can be applied to other natural or man-made disasters, benefiting many more U.S. citizens. This technology will create highly skilled jobs and increase partnerships between academia, industry, government, and wildland-urban interface communities. This technology innovation searches for the best evacuation strategies on digital replicates of the Wildland Urban Interface (WUI) using real-time traffic nearcast simulations that are dynamic and adaptive. These strategies are then be provided to evacuees as real-time, individualized routing guidance to safe destinations. The technology will also provide communications abilities, situational awareness, and an optimization platform for emergency response agencies. The project adopts the latest digital twin (DT) technology to revolutionize static planning methods and evacuation plan information distributed in leaflets. Specifically, for wildfire evacuation, the DT framework involves versatile simulations of the fire, communications, and traffic flow; Is designed to incorporate infrastructural parameters such as the road network, environmental parameters, as well as behavioral parameters of both the evacuees and the emergency managing agencies. The technical scope of this project focuses on the development and demonstration of a real-time solution based on DT simulation technology that improves a series of emergency evacuation metrics, including the total evacuation times, fire exposure times, and traffic congestion. Numerical validation against observed data and computational speed testing will be carried out to quantify the effectiveness and computational efficiency in order to build a baseline understanding of the performance of the solution, and subsequently establish confidence in real-life implementation. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.