Abstract
In disaster situations, special support for the disaster weak are crucial to keep them safe. Common evacuation strategies guide individuals to the shelters closest to their present locations. If evacuees are unevenly distributed across areas, some shelters will not be able to accommodate all arriving evacuees due to the limited capacity of shelters. To tackle this, the existing method decides the destinations for each evacuee considering congestion in disaster areas. However, this method does not consider the disaster weak and can be burdensome for them. Giving that the priority to the disaster weak for shelter decision would be effective to lessen burdens for them, but not all evacuees follow the guidance. When a shelter accepts arriving evacuees unconditionally, some evacuees are rejected, causing a delay in evacuation. If the disaster weak are rejected, the delay will be increased. In this paper, we propose two evacuation shelter decision methods considering the capacity of shelters, the disaster weak, and evacuees’ selfish behavior to realize quick evacuation for the disaster weak: (1) Fixed-rate Reduction Method (FRM), which reduces the assignment number of evacuees less than the capacity at the same percentage to all shelters. (2) Simulation-based Reduction Method (SRM), which reduces the assignment number to shelters that will be crowded based on simulation of an evacuation scenario. Then, these methods decide the destinations for evacuees, with the priority given to the disaster weak. To evaluate the efficiency of the proposed methods, we conducted multi-agent simulation assuming the scenario of evacuation of 30,000 visitors for the Gion Festival including the disaster weak. Through the simulation, we compared our methods with conventional methods including the nearest shelter selection method and the exiting method. As a result, our methods can reduce evacuation time of the disaster weak compared to conventional methods with sufficient cooperation by evacuees.
Highlights
When disasters such as earthquakes, typhoons, and floods occur, appropriate evacuation methods for evacuees are crucial to keep evacuees safe
We newly propose two evacuation methods that consider the disaster weak and evacuee behavior: (1) Fixed-rate Reduction Method (FRM) and (2) Simulationbased Reduction Method (SRM)
We extend the procedure of limiting the assignment number of each shelter to the method by Umeki et al [7], and the disaster weak are given priority in the shelter decision procedure
Summary
When disasters such as earthquakes, typhoons, and floods occur, appropriate evacuation methods for evacuees are crucial to keep evacuees safe. Various factors can determine the specific situations of evacuees These include the physical features of individuals, population distributions, and the environment of the disaster areas. Analyzing the factors that characterize the particular situations of disaster evacuees can provide a solution for developing evacuation strategies. Some evacuees, such as the elderly, children, pregnant women, the injured, and disabled people are regarded as the “disaster weak” [1,2]. Due to their limited physical abilities, they are assumed to have more difficulty evacuating than healthy people.
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