## 5 Evacuation Modeling Packages
### Macroscale  
The macro models are mostly used to plan evacuations. These models are suitable for analyzing the evacuation process under the threat of hurricanes or floods affecting large  
Figure 1: Required data for Evacuation Model Design.  
areas. Metropolitan planning organizations use macro models to simulate the evacuation process. On the other hand, these models are unsuitable for implementing traffic strategies or assessing the causes of congestion on highways or roads.  
Macro models also include real-time decision support tools that help authorities to take appropriate actions during an evacuation operation.  
**EMME4.6** is a city transportation planning system that provides planners with a complete range of traffic and transportation modeling capabilities. This model can explain, assess, and compare several suggested scenarios simultaneously. This package is a tool to provide a series of trip forecasts. This software can operate between very simple four-step evacuation plans to more advanced and detailed scenarios and their implementation in the road and traffic networks. It also enables the users to analyze different scenarios by changing the roads, transportation system, or even the community's economic situation. The user could interactively introduce the new data in dataset methods [69].  
**The Evacuation Traffic Information System (ETIS)** is an Internet-based platform that enables southeastern state authorities to share evacuation and traffic data. The ETIS helps with decisions, including which evacuation style to use (voluntary, obligatory, or staged) and whether to use contraflow or lane-reversal operations. The Federal Highway Administration, the United States Army Corps of Engineers, and the Federal Emergency Management Agency created the ETIS. ETIS is a macro model created to forecast huge cross-state traffic flows. Emergency management personnel can use the travel demand forecasting system to view the model online and add data particular to their location. The technology can predict evacuation traffic bottlenecks as well as cross-state traffic movements [70].  
The Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) created **OREMS 2.5 (Oak Ridge Evacuation Modeling System)** to predict evacuation timelines and to help design evacuation strategies in different circumstances, for instance, evacuation at various times of the day or under different weather conditions. This software enables the user to analyze different evacuation destinations and different or substitute routes to reach there and assess the evacuees' response rate and traffic management methods for different conditions. OREMS can compute the required time of evacuation and anticipate traffic factors such as the mean speed of the traffic flow, bottlenecks, and other required data to design an evacuation plan. The researchers at ORNL deem it necessary to have this decision tool that includes OREM, and with its output data, the user can analyze the risk areas, provide substitute strategies, assess the traffic operations, and make them more efficient by suggesting methods such as contraflow or use of the road shoulders [71].  
**TransCAD** is an operational package that includes GIS and a macro-level simulation platform. For network evacuation simulation, TransCAD additionally contains a dedicated Evacuation Analysis Procedure. The traffic assessment technique shows how the traffic patterns change through time and space during an evacuation and also gives the clearance time to the operator. The dynamic data on vehicle flow during an evacuation can be used to recognize the bottlenecks. This feature enables the operator to reassess the evacuation plan and analyze the efficiency of other traffic strategies, such as specific signaling of the routes, contraflow, and use of high-capacity vehicles [72].