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Publication

Modeling evacuation demand during no-notice emergency events: Tour formation behavior

Authors

Golshani, Nima; Shabanpour, Ramin; Mohammadian, Abolfazl; Auld, Joshua; Ley, Hubert

Abstract

Disastrous events have been drastically increasing both in frequency and destructive capacity over the past few years. While advance-notice events have received a great deal of attention in the literature of disaster management, not much attention so far has been given to the no-notice events mainly because of the scarcity of data. As an attempt to address this critical gap, the current study proposes a disaggregate evacuation demand framework to understand evacuees travel behavior in case of no-notice emergency events. The proposed framework comprises four main steps of evacuation decision, evacuation planning, tour formation, and activity schedule update. This article is dedicated to the introduction of the framework structure and elaboration on the tour formation step. In this step, we first estimate the total number of intermediate stops, travel time, and distance of the evacuation tours for those who decide to evacuate through a joint modeling structure and then, determine the type of each intermediate stop (if any). It is found that a broad range of factors including evacuees demographic profiles, built-environment attributes, and characteristics of the disastrous event plays a significant role in peoples evacuation behavior during no-notice emergency events. The findings of this study can assist responsible agencies in understanding evacuees complex behavior, and consequently, in devising effective strategies to alleviate economic damages and casualties resulted by such events.