Oak Ridge Evacuation Modeling System

OREMS is a Windows-based software program developed to address problems encountered in conducting evacuation time estimation studies using available commercial and public domain software. The goal was to produce a software program that utilized the latest traffic simulation software from DOT and would run faster than other models and simplify the modeling process.

Some uses of OREMS in Emergency Management include:

• determining feasibility of evacuation without detailed route planning,
• identifying bottlenecks that would constrain the flow of traffic,
• assessing the effectiveness of alternative traffic control strategies,
• assessing the effectiveness of different evacuation strategies,
• estimating traffic speed on specific roads of portions of the network,
• estimating queuing times at traffic lights or bottlenecks, and
• estimating clearance times for the network or portions of the network.
  

Types of specific data produced by OREMS includes:

• vehicles on each road segment,
• amount of traffic congestion on each road segment,
• number of vehicles traveling past a given point,
• amount of time a vehicle takes to travel from one intersection to another,
• average traffic speed on each road segment, and
• total time required to evacuate.