Analysis of evacuation destination and departure time choices for no-notice emergency events

ABSTRACT

Over the past decades, both the frequency and severity of disastrous events have increased all over the world. Thus far, many studies have focused on people’s evacuation behaviour during advance-notice events. However, little is known about their behaviour during no-notice events mainly because of the scarcity of available data. In an effort to address such a gap, this study presents a joint model to estimate evacuee’s destination and departure time choices in the context of no-notice emergency events. These two critical decisions can directly influence spatial and temporal traffic distributions in the network in case of disastrous events. A copula-based joint structure is proposed to explore the interdependencies between these evacuation attributes that stem from the shared factors influencing them and/or the causal effects that they might have on each other.

KEYWORDS:

• No-notice evacuation
• destination choice
• departure time
• joint discrete–continuous

Acknowledgments

This work was performed under subcontract FP062899-D with the University of Chicago, and is part of contract D2015-SRER-007 between the Federal Transit Agency and the University of Chicago. The contract has been awarded as part of the broad agency announcement FTA-2013-005-TRI under the title ‘Coordinated Transit Response Planning and Operations Support Tools for Mitigating Impacts of All-Hazard Emergency Events’. However, the authors are solely responsible for the findings of this research.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by University of Chicago [grant number FP062899-D].