An agent-based evacuation model for the 2011 Brisbane City-scale riverine flood

Authored by Xuefen Liu, Samsung Lim

Date Published: 2018

DOI: 10.1007/s11069-018-3373-1

Sponsors: No sponsors listed

Platforms: No platforms listed

Model Documentation: Other Narrative

Model Code URLs: Model code not found

Abstract

In this study, an agent-based model is proposed in order to provide new insights into the policy analysis and strategy assessment of city-scale evacuation management. The proposed model is suitable for assessment of the influence of different departure times and communications among peer evacuees on the number of residents at risk who arrive at official shelters. A case study is applied to build a simulation model for the coastal city of Brisbane in Australia. The Brisbane River catchment experiences regular flooding almost every year; the second severest flood since the twentieth century occurred in 2011. During that event, over 15,000 properties were inundated and around 3600 households evacuated in metropolitan Brisbane alone. Making use of high-performance computing clusters, the evacuation simulation was coupled with results from a validated hydrodynamic model to test a variety of escaping scenarios based on the 2011 flood situation. This case study demonstrates the proposed model's capacity to represent the dynamic evacuation process and also shows that the model is able to help develop flood emergency plans and evaluate response measures through exploring key elements in a range of scenarios.

Tags

Agent-based modelling Simulations City-scale evacuation resilience Australia Urban Evacuation modelling Flood dynamics Flood response management