Studying the Impact of Public Transport on Disaster Evacuation

Abstract

Disasters of different types are an increasing threat to modern societies. The speed at which people can evacuate a disaster may mean the difference between life or death. One way of modelling disaster evacuation is by using multi-agent simulation, in which each person in a population is simulated as an autonomous individual. This enables emergency management groups to analyse the results across a range of scenarios, under varying parameter settings, to better under-stand how to reduce evacuation times. Previous studies have used this approach to model disaster evacuations, but only considered evacuation on foot. This research studies the effect of public transport on the evacuation process using the Multi-Agent Transport Simulation (MATSim) platform. Experimental results show large reductions in the average evacuation time of agents can be achieved using public transport, compared with pedestrian traffic only. A sensitivity analysis illustrates the conditions under which additional buses can be added to further reduce evacuation time and the limit of this improvement.