Population Evacuations

Abstract

Emergency evacuation is one of the most important protective action alternatives when facing a natural or a man-made disaster. The planning and implementation of a large-scale emergency evacuation is a difficult and complex problem that requires the interactions of many agencies and involves a large amount of information. This article focuses on the latter and discusses the models that are normally used in the planning phase to evaluate this type of protective action alternatives and the information requirements for their implementation. Although many advances have been achieved in this area, especially during the last few years, a considerable amount of work still remains incomplete. Some of the important areas that need attention, such as improvements in the demographic models, integration of traffic simulation and threat evolution models, and real-time information for the deployment phase, are also discussed in this paper.