Analysis of Flood Evacuation Process in Vulnerable Community with Mutual Aid Mechanism: An Agent-Based Simulation Framework

TLDR

Timely and secure evacuation of residents during flood disasters is a critical issue in urban community flood risk management, particularly for vulnerable communities. The study proposes an agent‑based modeling framework to examine how community properties, residents’ psychological attributes, and mutual aid mechanisms influence flood evacuation. The framework models community density, vulnerable resident proportion, flood risk tolerance thresholds, and mutual aid interactions to simulate evacuation dynamics. Simulations show that higher community density and lower flood risk tolerance reduce evacuation efficiency, while the impact of vulnerable resident proportion depends on density, and mutual aid mechanisms shorten evacuation time especially in low‑density communities.

Abstract

Timely and secure evacuation of residents during flood disasters or other emergency events is an important issue in urban community flood risk management, especially in vulnerable communities. An agent-based modeling framework was proposed in order to indicate how the community properties (e.g., community density and percentage of vulnerable residents), residents’ psychological attributes (e.g., flood risk tolerance threshold) and mutual aid mechanism affect the flood evacuation process. Results indicated that: (1) The community density negatively affected the flood evacuation efficiency. The greater the density of the community, the longer the evacuation time. (2) There was a negative correlation between the flood risk tolerance threshold of residents and evacuation efficiency. (3) The proportion of vulnerable resident agents had opposite effects on the evacuation efficiency of different types of communities, which was to negatively affect low-density communities and positively affect high-density communities. (4) Mutual aid mechanism can reduce evacuation time in low-density communities, and the effect was more pronounced with a higher proportion of vulnerable resident agents in the community. These findings can help managers to develop better emergency evacuation management for urban communities.