The representation and implementation of time-dependent inundation in large-scale microscopic evacuation simulations

Abstract

Multi Agent Simulation has increasingly been used for transportation simulation in recent years. With current techniques, it is possible to simulate systems consisting of several million agents. Such Multi Agent Simulations have been applied to whole cities and even large regions. In this paper it is demonstrated how to adapt an existing multi agent transportation simulation framework to large-scale pedestrian evacuation simulation. The underlying flow model simulates the traffic based on a simple queue model where only free speed, bottleneck capacities, and space constraints are taken into account. The queue simulation, albeit simple, captures the most important aspects of evacuations such as the congestion effects of bottlenecks and the time needed to evacuate the endangered area. In the case of an evacuation simulation the network has time dependent attributes. For instance, large-scale inundations or conflagrations do not cover all the endangered area at once. These time dependent attributes are modeled as network change events. Network change events are modifying link parameters at predefined points in time. The simulation framework is demonstrated through a case study for the Indonesian city of Padang, which faces a high risk of being inundated by a tsunami.

Hypothetical Tsunami Scenarios and Evacuation Intention: A Case Study of Orange County, California

“…These challenges have prompted studies that have employed the use of simulation models in which different data inputs and modeling approaches, such as [17,[18][19][20][21][22][23][24][25][26][27][28][29][30][31], were used to study various tsunami inundation scenarios. While this research doesn't focus on producing a new tsunami modeling approach, it mainly utilizes the product of an existing tsunami model, one created for the purpose of simulating tsunami inundation from different tsunami events: the Method of Splitting Tsunami (MOST) Model.…”

“…A telephone survey was created to measure the behavioral responses The selection of the survey questions was based on a combination of an existing hurricane and tsunami research that studied the behaviors of the population at risk of tsunami and hurricane [35,36]. The reason for combining the hurricane research with the tsunami survey design was based on the larger number of hurricane studies done to capture the behaviors of the evacuees, compared to the tsunami studies, which focused mainly on the intention of evacuation [17,18,37]. For the tsunami scenario section of the survey, specifically, the researcher is concerned with knowing if the sampled population would evacuate in case of an evacuation order by government officials of Orange County in the events of tsunamis of 10, 20, and 30 feet.…”

“…Lammel et al [17] conducted a tsunami evacuation study in the urban coastal areas for the city of Padang, in western Sumatra, Indonesia. Their research aimed to estimate the evacuation time, identify bottlenecks, and detect highly endangered areas of the study area.…”

An accessibility graph-based model to optimize tsunami evacuation sites and routes in Martinique, France

“…Japan) (Mas et al, 2012), or at the scale of the city (e.g. Indonesia) (Lämmel et al, 2010;Taubenböck et al, 2009) in case of tsunami. Most of these tools require a thorough knowledge of computer programming and long term computation.…”

Getting Out of the Way: Collision-Avoiding Pedestrian Models Compared to the RealWorld

“…In recent times MATSim has also been used for the simulation of pedestrians in the evacuation context [17,16,4]. The underlying traffic flow simulation relies in all this works on a queue model [6].…”