Exploring the Role of Social Media and Individual Behaviors in Flood Evacuation Processes: An Agent-Based Modeling Approach

Authored by Ximing Cai, Erhu Du, Barbara Minsker, Zhiyong Sun

Date Published: 2017

DOI: 10.1002/2017wr021192

Sponsors: No sponsors listed

Platforms: No platforms listed

Model Documentation: Other Narrative Mathematical description

Model Code URLs: Model code not found

Abstract

Flood warnings from various information sources are important for individuals to make evacuation decisions during a flood event. In this study, we develop a general opinion dynamics model to simulate how individuals update their flood hazard awareness when exposed to multiple information sources, including global broadcast, social media, and observations of neighbors' actions. The opinion dynamics model is coupled with a traffic model to simulate the evacuation processes of a residential community with a given transportation network. Through various scenarios, we investigate how social media affect the opinion dynamics and evacuation processes. We find that stronger social media can make evacuation processes more sensitive to the change of global broadcast and neighbor observations, and thus, impose larger uncertainty on evacuation rates (i.e., a large range of evacuation rates corresponding to sources of information). For instance, evacuation rates are lower when social media become more influential and individuals have less trust in global broadcast. Stubborn individuals can significantly affect the opinion dynamics and reduce evacuation rates. In addition, evacuation rates respond to the percentage of stubborn agents in a nonlinear manner, i.e., above a threshold, the impact of stubborn agents will be intensified by stronger social media. These results highlight the role of social media in flood evacuation processes and the need to monitor social media so that misinformation can be corrected in a timely manner. The joint impacts of social media, quality of flood warnings, and transportation capacity on evacuation rates are also discussed.

Tags

Simulation Agent-based modeling Uncertainty Opinion dynamics networks Social media Decision-Making sensitivity information transportation Cascades Warnings Flood evacuation