This project will develop new methodologies for understanding hurricane evacuations by integrating behavioral modeling of household decision making with dynamic transportation modeling. By understanding evacuation decision making, the research will contribute to improving the efficiency of hurricane evacuation.
This project will develop novel modeling approaches to: (1) Estimate the social, demographic and cultural characteristics that influence household evacuation decision making from surveys of Miami-Dade County residents; (2) Understand how people synthesize evacuation warnings up to the time they make the decision to evacuate; (3) Assess the influence of household decisions based on spatial location; (4) Estimate the temporal variation of evacuees from the time of warning; (5) Determine the optimal time of departure, optimal route and destination choice based on the temporal demand patterns; (6) Incorporate behavioral rules obtained from social science analysis to simulate the transportation system impacts; and (7) Identify ways to distribute the obtained results from multiple hurricane scenarios to stakeholders.
The project will use multidisciplinary approaches to understand hurricane evacuation by bringing together approaches from social science, network optimization, agent-based modeling, transportation operations, stochastic optimization and hurricane emergency response.
