Modeling pedestrian mobility in disaster areas

Abstract Realistic mobility modeling is necessary for testing disaster management strategies as well as performance of disaster–resilient networks. Evacuation of the people from a disaster area depends on the environment and type of the hazard which cause certain changes in the pedestrian flows. Although most models focus on the building evacuations or city-scale evacuation planning, there is a need for a mobility model that captures the pedestrians’ movement behavior during evacuation from large and crowded disaster areas such as theme parks. In this paper, we propose a mobility model of the pedestrians in disaster areas. In our application scenario of theme parks, the main mission of the operators is the evacuation of the visitors and providing access to transportation vehicles such as ambulances. We use real maps to generate theme park models with obstacles, roads, and disaster events. We incorporate macro and micro mobility decisions of the visitors, considering their local knowledge and the social interactions among the visitors. We analyze the outcomes of the simulation of our theme park disaster (TP-D) mobility model with simulations of currently used models and real-world GPS traces. Moreover, using the proposed model as a baseline, we analyze the performance of an opportunistic network application.