2023 Volume 79 Issue 24 Article ID: 23-24001
Although it is generally prohibited to use a car to evacuate from a tsunami, there were cases in which people were saved by evacuating by car during the Great East Japan Earthquake. Therefore, it is important to consider the safety of car evacuation. In this study, we investigated a method for predicting the damage situation when there is a car evacuation and examining traffic control for disaster mitigation based on real-time traffic conditions. In this method, traffic conditions are simulated in real time based on commercial vehicle probe data and cross-sectional traffic volume data from road surveillance cameras. By combining the prediction of the movement of evacuation vehicles with the reproduced traffic conditions as the initial values and the tsunami inundation prediction, the number of affected vehicles and the location of the damage can be calculated. We applied this method to the hypothetical Nankai Trough mega-earthquake tsunami in the coastal area of Nagoya City, and confirmed the accelerating increase in the number of victims in relation to the increase in the number of vehicles evacuated. In addition, the possibilities of disaster mitigation by signal control that prioritizes traffic flow from the coastal area and suppression of vehicle evacuation from outside the tsunami flooded area were shown.
