Determining Maximum Vehicular Flow For City Evacuation Planning

In this paper, the high-level contribution involves using the Ford-Fulkerson algorithm on a road network graph to determine the following between any pair of street intersections: (a) the maximum number of cars that can be routed from one street intersection to another and (b) the minimum set of edges (or the minimum cut) which when removed, makes it not possible to route any car between any two street intersections. In addition, four U.S. cities were used for testing: Jackson, MS; New Orleans, LA; Mobile, AL; and Tallahassee, FL. Using the Ford-Fulkerson algorithm for a given set of vertices V, set of edges E with weight capacities, a source (s) and destination (d) for any one of the above city graphs, we were able to determine the set of augmenting paths and bottleneck edges (minimum cut) between any two given node IDs (vertices or street intersections); that is, assuming such a path exists to begin with. Moreover, the main theme of this paper can be used not only for U.S. cities like New Orleans, LA or Tallahassee, FL, but for other coastal cities located at various points around the globe where evacuation planning can be a critical factor toward survival.