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

飓风疏散是一个复杂的过程，涉及飓风系统、建筑环境，特别是运输系统，以及沿海社区个人和家庭的疏散决策和行动之间的相互作用。先前的研究表明，疏散过程取决于飓风的强度、方向和速度，但研究界一直缺乏在单一建模框架内将这些复杂系统联系在一起的方法。该项目将对这些不同系统之间的相互作用进行建模，以便在单一框架内更好地捕捉和理解在不同类型的飓风风暴情景下与疏散相关的问题。由此产生的框架将极大地促进对这些过程的科学理解，有助于减少飓风带来的潜在生命损失，并帮助州和地方机构更好地规划飓风疏散。这项工作的更广泛的社会受益者包括沿海社区、政府机构和企业。飓风疏散是一个复杂的过程，涉及许多交叉的物理社会因素和不确定性，这些因素随着时间的推移而演变。这项研究的最终目标是研究综合飓风疏散系统的复杂动态，并随后帮助减轻经常伴随热带系统而来的生命损失。为此，构建了代表与飓风疏散系统相关的三个相互交织的元素的模型：自然灾害（飓风、预报、警报信息）、人类系统（信息流、与疏散相关的决策）和建筑环境（交通基础设施和疏散路线）。通过将这些模型集成到一个统一的、基于代理的框架中，该项目将创建一个虚拟实验室，在这个实验室中，模型部件可以以不同的方式受到干扰，以观察组件如何相互作用，并在不同的飓风情景下影响疏散过程。生成的模型系统将提高科学界模拟和理解综合飓风疏散系统动态和结果的复杂性的能力。该奖项反映了美国国家科学基金会的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的知识价值和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。

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.