Abstract
Abstract. The flood–pedestrian simulator uses a parallel approach to couple a hydrodynamic model to a pedestrian model in a single agent-based modelling (ABM) framework on graphics processing units (GPU), allowing dynamic exchange and processing of multiple-agent information across the two models. The simulator is enhanced with more realistic human body characteristics and in-model behavioural rules. The new features are implemented in the pedestrian model to factor in age- and gender-related walking speeds for the pedestrians in dry zones around the floodwater and to include a maximum excitement condition. It is also adapted to use age-related moving speeds for pedestrians inside the floodwater, with either a walking condition or a running condition. The walking and running conditions are applicable without and with an existing two-way interaction condition that considers the effects of pedestrian congestion on the floodwater spreading. A new autonomous change of direction condition is proposed to make pedestrian agents autonomous in wayfinding decisions driven by their individual perceptions of the flood risk or the dominant choice made by the others. The relevance of the newly added characteristics and rules is demonstrated by applying the augmented simulator to reproduce a synthetic test case of a flood evacuation in a shopping centre, to then contrast its outcomes against the version of the simulator that does not consider age and gender in the agent characteristics. The enhanced simulator is demonstrated for a real-world case study of a mass evacuation from the Hillsborough football stadium, showing usefulness for flood emergency evacuation planning in outdoor spaces where destination choice and individual risk perception have great influence on the simulation outcomes.
Highlights
Flooding can disturb local communities in and around urban hubs, putting people at risk (Flood and coastal erosion risk management policy statement, 2020)
The flood–pedestrian simulator dynamically couples a hydrodynamic model to a pedestrian model within the same agent-based modelling (ABM) framework, FLAMEGPU (Shirvani et al, 2020, 2021)
The location of the site is framed with a dark red square in Fig. 7, including an area of 16 384 m2 that is adjacent to the eastern side of the stadium, where the main entrances are located
Summary
Flooding can disturb local communities in and around urban hubs, putting people at risk (Flood and coastal erosion risk management policy statement, 2020). One first effort in designing an ABM-based evacuation simulator capable of capturing microscopic responses at a small urban scale was made by Bernardini et al (2017) They developed FlooPEDS by incorporating the standard social force model for pedestrian dynamics (Helbing and Molnar, 1995), which was adapted to further model individuals’ moving speed and stability states in floodwater. The simulator was found to predict significantly prolonged evacuation times and a higher number of at-risk pedestrians in low- to medium-risk areas in line with an increased sophistication in the pedestrian agent characteristics and behavioural rules (Shirvani et al, 2020), even without enabling the two-way interaction condition In the latter version of the simulator, pedestrian agents were initialised to store body height and mass information, which were key human body factors considered to influence the determination of their stability states in the floodwater. The datasets of the simulated case studies and a video supplement that visualises simulations in real time as well as the source code of the latest version of simulator on FLAMEGPU (Shirvani and Kesserwani, 2021a) including a detailed user guide are openly accessible (Shirvani and Kesserwani, 2021b; Shirvani, 2021)
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