Collaborative Research: An Agent-Based Investigation of Hurricane Evacuation Dynamics: Key Factors, Connections, and Emergent Behaviors

Hurricane evacuations are a complex process involving interactions among hurricane systems, the built environment, particularly transportation systems, and the evacuation decisions and actions of individuals and households in our coastal communities. Previous research suggests that evacuation processes vary depending up on the nature of hurricanes in terms of their intensity, direction, and speed, but the research community has been lacking in approaches to link these complex systems together within a single modeling framework.

This project will model the interactions among these different systems to better capture and understand the problems and issues associated with evacuations under different kinds of hurricane storms scenarios within a single framework. The resulting framework will greatly facilitate the scientific understanding of these processes helping reduce potential loss of life that often accompany hurricanes and help state and local agencies better plan for hurricane evacuation.

The broader societal beneficiaries of this work include coastal communities, government agencies, and businesses.

Hurricane evacuations are a complex process involving many intersecting physical-social factors and uncertainties which evolve over time. The ultimate goal of the research is to examine the complex dynamics of the integrated hurricane evacuation system, and subsequently, to help mitigate the loss of life that often accompanies tropical systems. To that end, models are constructed representing three interwoven elements relevant to the hurricane evacuation system: the natural hazard (hurricane, forecasts, warning information), the human system (information flow, evacuation-related decisions), and the built environment (transportation infrastructure and evacuation routing).

By integrating these models into a unified, agent-based framework, the project will create a virtual laboratory where model pieces can be perturbed in different ways to see how components interact and influence evacuation processes under different hurricane scenarios. The model system generated will advance the scientific community’s ability to model and understand the complexities of the integrated hurricane evacuation system dynamics and outcomes.

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.