Improvement of Evacuation Modeling by Considering Road Blockade in the Case of an Earthquake: A Case Study of Daitoku School District, Kanazawa City, Japan

• Main Authors: Dinh-Thanh Nguyen, Zhen-Jiang Shen, Minh-Hoang Truong, Kenichi Sugihara
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: MDPI AG 2021-03-01
• Series: Sustainability
• Subjects: debris; damaged building; evacuee; accessibility; network analysis; Geographic Information System (GIS)
• Online Access: https://www.mdpi.com/2071-1050/13/5/2637

In disaster management, evacuation modeling is considered a useful visual tool to disaster managers for reviewing current evacuation strategies, estimating the ability of shelters to accommodate all evacuees, and developing evacuation route planning. Though there are several existing studies on evacuation modeling in the case of an earthquake, research that integrates road blockades into evacuation simulations is quite limited. From that viewpoint, this research aims to develop evacuation modeling with consideration of road blockades to simulate how residents move to evacuation centers (hereafter, shelters) through urban areas following an earthquake occurrence. The research also determines difficulties that residents may encounter under earthquake conditions, compared with normal conditions, corresponding to considering or not considering road blockades, respectively, such as having no access to shelters, taking longer routes instead of shortest routes, and so on. Debris from damaged buildings in an urban area is assumed as the main source of debris that would cause a road blockade. The model is applied to a case study of the Daitoku school district in Kanazawa city. According to simulated results, due to road blockades, occupants of many damaged buildings did not have access to shelters, and a lot of evacuees needed to move to shelters with longer routes instead of taking the shortest routes. Furthermore, the research results show the possibility of considering road blockades for improving current evacuation modeling and making evacuation simulations more realistic.