Agent-based modelling and simulation of urban evacuation: relative effectiveness of simultaneous and staged evacuation strategies

This study investigates the effectiveness of simultaneous and staged evacuation strategies using agent-based simulation. In the simultaneous strategy, all residents are informed to evacuate simultaneously, whereas in the staged evacuation strategy, residents in different zones are organized to evacuate in an order based on different sequences of the zones within the affected area. This study uses an agent-based technique to model traffic flows at the level of individual vehicles and investigates the collective behaviours of evacuating vehicles. We conducted simulations using a microscopic simulation system called Paramics on three types of road network structures under different population densities.