Abstract
We study evacuation dynamics in a major urban region (Miami, FL) using a combination of a realistic population and social contact network, and an agent-based model of evacuation behavior that takes into account peer influence and concerns of looting. These factors have been shown to be important in prior work, and have been modeled as a threshold-based network dynamical systems model (2mode-threshold), which involves two threshold parameters—for a family’s decision to evacuate and to remain in place for looting and crime concerns—based on the fraction of neighbors who have evacuated. The dynamics of such models are not well understood, and we observe that the threshold parameters have a significant impact on the evacuation dynamics. We also observe counter-intuitive effects of increasing the evacuation threshold on the evacuated fraction in some regimes of the model parameter space, which suggests that the details of realistic networks matter in designing policies.
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Acknowledgments
We thank the anonymous reviewers for their helpful feedback. We thank our colleagues at NSSAC and Research Computing at the University of Virginia. This work has been partially supported by University of Virginia Strategic Investment Fund award number SIF160, NSF Grant OAC-1916805 (CINES), NSF CRISP 2.0 (CMMI Grant 1916670 and CMMI Grant 1832693), NSF CMMI-1745207 and NSF Award 122135.
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Hancock, M. et al. (2022). Effect of Peer Influence and Looting Concerns on Evacuation Behavior During Natural Disasters. In: Benito, R.M., Cherifi, C., Cherifi, H., Moro, E., Rocha, L.M., Sales-Pardo, M. (eds) Complex Networks & Their Applications X. COMPLEX NETWORKS 2021. Studies in Computational Intelligence, vol 1073. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-93413-2_32
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-93413-2_32
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