Enhancing a tsunami evacuation simulation for a multi-scenario analysis using parallel computing

Authored by Fumihiko Imamura, Fumiyasu Makinoshima, Yoshi Abe

Date Published: 2018

DOI: 10.1016/j.simpat.2017.12.016

Sponsors: Japanese Society for the Promotion of Science (JSPS) International Research Institute of Disaster Science (IRIDeS)

Platforms: C++ OpenMPI

Model Documentation: Other Narrative Flow charts Mathematical description

Model Code URLs: Model code not found

Abstract

The numerical investigation of tsunami evacuation is becoming a major way to assess the potential evacuation risks and consider countermeasures, but it has been mostly limited to GIS-based static analysis or macroscopic agent-based modelling due to the costs of large-scale simulations. In this paper, we propose a simplified force-based evacuation simulation model and an easy-to-implement parallelization strategy for a large-scale microscopic tsunami evacuation simulation and demonstrate its applications in an actual urban environment. First, the simulation performance was verified and validated against experimental and observational results regarding basic pedestrian movement. The test results qualitatively and quantitatively showed good agreement with real pedestrian movements. The model was then applied to a case of tsunami evacuations in Kesennuma City, where the 2011 Tohoku tsunami caused devastating damage. The model was successfully scaled up to provide urban-scale characterization. In this application, the developed simulator was implemented by a hybrid MPI/OpenMP parallelized computing technique. By utilizing the proposed model with parallel computing, we achieved an urban-scale microscopic evacuation simulation five times faster than real-time and a stochastic simulation to evaluate the uncertainty in the evacuation simulation. (C) 2017 The Authors. Published by Elsevier B.V.

Tags

Agent-based modelling Parallel computing Pedestrian dynamics Tsunami evacuation Real-time simulation Force model