Disaster evacuation planning
Natural or human-provoked disasters (e.g., wildfires, floods, warzones) lead to costly humanitarian and environmental crises affecting the civil population. Although mitigation, preparedness, and recovery processes are widely adopted by first responders and public authorities, they show limitations. Data, models, and response standards in disaster management are often specific to regions and disaster types and exist in information silos. This localized approach has limited applicability for the larger developing picture of strategic resilience of affected areas.
The population resilience factor
An essential aspect of disaster resilience is the capacity to prevent, mitigate, and respond to safety impacts of natural disasters of the population. A disaster mitigation plan can only be complete if it ensures that communities living in disaster-hit areas are protected, their risk can be forecasted over upcoming years, and infrastructure or management plans can be implemented to enhance their safety. Population resilience involves three main tasks:
- Risk quantification and forecast on population segments
- Evacuation plans and population mobility in case of disasters
- Proper allocation of limited or hard to distribute resources based on the type of disaster and population needs
Geospatial data analytics and routing models are necessary to quantify the predicted safety impacts to the population. When these are aggregated and analyzed, a forecast can be created to appropriately plan for different climate related scenarios, and reduce displacements, costs of rebuilding and insurance, and economic losses. Learn more about our capabilities in geospatial services.
Evacuation time is key to assessing time-varying risks to the population and to managing evacuation paths efficiently. Be it evacuation to a safe zone or to a healthcare facility, citizen movements depend on population density, demographics, vulnerability levels, transportation network capacity, and traffic management actions taken by police departments / sheriff offices. In case of disasters, the number of problems these agents need to manage skyrocket and they need to prioritize which actions have the highest impact. Assessing the status and the short-term evolution of the impact of a disaster in the road network is crucial in deciding the actions to take, which can completely change the traffic dynamics and the evacuation routes.
Learn more about Skymantics Advanced Routing Engine.
Furthermore, the access to reliable and updated information is key for the success of relief efforts. Convoys delivering goods, food and health supplies, and first responder teams, can also suffer from environmental and security hazards, potentially jeopardizing emergency response, food-aid and healthcare access programmes.
Our solutions focus on mitigation of exposure
and risk for affected populations
Skymantics has been a leader in the Open Geospatial Consortium’s API Routes, and a participant in the Smart City Interoperability Reference Architecture (SCIRA) Pilot and in the Disasters Pilot 2021. We have developed a logistics and routing engine that can now be applied as a core component to a Model of Model Disasters Transportation Network to support real world Natural Disasters. Skymantics has also conducted previous work relating to route generation, navigation, and visualization through its PAXCloud effort of indoor and multimodal navigation mapping. Skymantics is also a charter member of the OGC Routing SWG and has helped define the scope and wide use of the routing API.
Learn more about our work with the open geospatial community.
Population risk
indexing
Evacuation time
and
distance to care
Mitigation,
evacuation &
logistics scenario planning
Varying hazards, road closures, and vehicle constraints
Integration of external data sources
Open architecture
Offline data containers
Skymantics approach to disaster management is to fill current gaps in the software and best practices required to be able to work with geospatially correlated types of population data (volumes, densities, physical, and social data) and disaster data (numerical models and Earth Observation).
Our tools transform disparate sources of raw data into decision-ready information and visualize feasible capabilities. We use diverse data processing methodologies including Machine Learning, data fusion, and modeling to produce outputs of low-volume, analysis ready information.
Skymantics’ approach to generate synthetic populations allows us to estimate demographics, geography distribution across jurisdictions, and vulnerability risk without compromising Personally Identifiable Information (PII). This output is then used to predict the evolution of disaster exposure and evacuation bottlenecks to optimize evacuation operations.
Scenario views allow the user to prioritize evacuation areas or vulnerable populations, adapt previously defined evacuation plans to the immediate threat, and modify road utilization patterns to expedite evacuation, both taking into account forecasted evolution of disaster and related health hazards.
Do you have a need in disaster evacuation planning? Contact us to query about our evacuation planning toolset and request a demo today.