Transportation simulator for disaster circumstance and bottleneck analysis

Abstract

In recent years, massive earthquakes struck Japan, causing large-scale disasters such as the great Hanshin-Awaji earthquake in 1997, the Niigata Prefecture Chuetsu earthquake in 2004, the great east Japan earthquake in 2011, and the Kumamoto earthquake in 2016. In the all disasters above, logistics system for relief supplies collapsed and it was repeated that the relief supplies were not delivered properly to the evacuation refugees. The cause of repetition of this situation is the lack of knowledge to estimate the capability of the logistics system in the disaster response plan, which may constitute a part of disaster prevention plan. In this paper, two analysis tools are introduced. One is a simulator based on the multi-agent system, in which the vehicles, e.g., trucks, ships, aircrafts, as agents determine their delivery destination corresponding to sufficiency ratios of the relief supplies of respective evacuation centers. The other is an analytical solution to estimate transportation capability.