The impact of interpersonal pre-warning information dissemination on regional emergency evacuation

Abstract

Interpersonal pre-warning information dissemination among members of the population plays a critical role in serious emergencies such as tsunami, chemical leakage and terrorist attacks as there is no sufficient time for government agencies to notify all of the possibly influenced people within a disaster area. In this paper, we established an interpersonal pre-warning information dissemination model based on human visual and auditory senses to simulate how persons get information and evacuate from their residences or places of work to emergency shelters. Regional evacuation was simulated based on interpersonal evacuation information dissemination by combining twelve subjective and objective influencing factors. Through sensitivity analyses of each parameter including door’s status (open/closed) and personal states (with/without exclamation), sound attenuation caused by story’s slab, background sound, number of information sources, personal curiosity threshold and the probability a person will believe in the information, we propose several suggestions to optimize evacuation information dissemination and regional evacuation. This model can be used to make evacuation plan under the condition of insufficient responding time or paralyzed information networks. The results provide useful references for governmental decision making toward disaster pre-warning and efficient regional evacuation in metropolises.