Impact of evacuee behavior on evacuation clearance time

Evacuation is an effective strategy to mitigate damage of man-made or natural disasters. Evacuation clearance time is one of the key indicators in evacuation planning and management. Evacuees´ destination choice and route choice behavior are two crucial factors used to estimate evacuation clearance time. However, these two factors are viewed as constants in previous research, and the quantification of the impact of these two factors is lacking. In this paper, the authors report impact of variation of evacuees´ destination choice and route choice behavior on evacuation clearance time. The impact analysis is done based on a case study by using an artificial transportation system platform called TransWorld. And the best values of evacuees´ destination choice and route choice behavior are given, respectively. The computational experimental results illustrate that if evacuation managers adopt reasonable strategies to guide evacuees´ destination choice and route choice, it can significantly reduce evacuation clearance time. The simulation methodology, computational results and discussion can be used for future emergency evacuation planning. This study also provides potentials of new emergency evacuation management and control strategies from the perspective of evacuee behavior.