Design and Analysis of Evacuation Strategies for Chemical Industries (EvaC)
Despite high safety standards in chemical plants an accident including spread of hazardous substances cannot be excluded. Coordinated measures must then be taken quickly to ensure the safety of the employees.
In this project, which is a collaboration of the AG-Optimization and AG-Technomathematik at TU Kaiserslautern, supported by the BASF SE Ludwigshafen, the evacuation of a chemical plant and the surrounding region is studied while taking into account a spread of hazardous materials. It focuses on the design and analysis of specific evacuation strategies that considers topographical, chemical, and meteorological factors that influence the spread of hazardous substances.
Using optimization techniques allows for modeling paths and roads and with the aid of network algorithms it is possible to efficiently compute evacuation strategies. Moreover it can be guaranteed that those strategies impose lower bounds on the evacuation time. Partial differential equations can be used to simulate and predict the spread of the hazardous substance for several scenarios. Furthermore they can be used to model effects like congestion on roads as well as density-dependent velocities of evacuees, which can be used to refine the discrete optimization models.
Due to the cooperation with BASF, it is possible to test these models in realistic scenarios. This allows simulation of evacuation emergencies virtual to compare with empirical values and to detect possible issues.
Funding Institution
We thank Stiftung Rheinland-Pfalz für Innovation for funding this project.
Members
Related Talks and Publications
- Simone Göttlich, Sebastian Kühn, Jan Peter Ohst, Stefan Ruzika, and Markus Thiemann:
Evacuation Dynamics Influenced by Spreading Hazardous Material
Networks and Heterogeneous Media (6), pp. 443-464, 2011. - Sebastian Kühn:
Evacuation Dynamics Influenced by Spreading Hazardous Material
Poster Presentation at Pedestrian Evacuation Dynamics Conference (PED) 2012 - Jan Peter Ohst:
Minimizing the costs of evacuation paths by decomposing network flows
Presentation at the EURO 2012 in Vilnius - Jan Peter Ohst:
Introduction to network flow models to obtain provable lower bounds on evacuation times
Presentation at PED-PhD seminar 2012 in Wuppertal - Sebastian Kühn:
Evacuation dynamics influenced by spreading hazard
Presentation at PED-PhD seminar 2012 in Wuppertal - Jan Peter Ohst:
How emission of hazardous gas influences evacuation strategies
Presentation at Bergische Universität Wuppertal
