Modeling Urban Transportation in the Aftermath of a Nuclear Disaster: The Role of Human Behavioral Responses

This paper describes an integrated modeling environment for a large urban transportation system designed to capture human behaviors in the aftermath of an improvised nuclear device denotation. The integrated environment models the complex interplay of human behavior (under deteriorating health conditions) and infrastructural systems in the aftermath of such a hypothetical crisis. Prior work on this scenario has covered in detail physical and radiological effects of the blast, casualty estimates and impact on health, evacuation strategies, etc. assuming a static population distribution. Relatively few studies have accounted for how people respond to the event and the strong coupling that exists between the various infrastructural systems. This paper highlights the design aspects of the system concerning the transportation and behavior modules and their interactions. The transportation model incorporates dynamic network loading for auto and walk travel modes, group travel, crowd-following, as well as adjustments for ambient traffic to account for network loads caused by external agents. We present a collection of computational experiments offering insight into how different individual and collective behaviors of agents can affect evacuation times, route choices and health effects.