Exploring by Simulation Cities Awareness on Population Evacuation – ESCAPE

Populations are increasingly vulnerable to disastrous natural or technological events, as demographic and urban growth lead to greater exposures of goods and people. Large scale evacuation strategies are efficient tools for mitigating this vulnerability. Nonetheless, risks incurred during an important displacement through an altered environment are high: refusal to evacuate, crashes, direct exposure to the source hazard, riots, emergency services failures… In France a policy called Territoires à Risques importants d’Inondation (TRI) has emerged to deal with floods, in a first step to deal with the most frequent natural disaster in this country. Nevertheless, local governments and emergency managers lack prospective tools to assist their understanding and planning of large scale evacuations. ESCAPE aims at overcoming this major problem by the creation of an evacuation operational research system.

The core of our project is the tight coupling between Geographical Information Systems, agent-based multiscale modelling and computer simulation exploring tools. It will be deployed and validated on real case studies, so as to generate simulations realistic enough to allow their use by emergency managers for experimenting evacuation strategies.

By combining sources including territorial information (land occupation, transport networks, hazards expansion and intensity), demographic data (residential and transitional population numbers, age pyramid), a mobilityand traffic management simulator (cars, bikes, pedestrians, public transport), and by providing different evacuation strategies (partial or complete, by waves or synchronous), we will provide measures on evacuation time of various crisis zones, and will make explicit local and global constraints on these times. For that, we need to explore at multiple space and time scales the emergence of collective behaviours that would detract from planned strategies, and to devise solutions to dampen the consequences of these behaviours on the evacuation times. The ESCAPE team will build demonstrators to allow productive interactions with emergency services and remain reality-grounded for the whole duration of the project. These prototypes will allow us to precisely identify the stakes at play in each case study and the needs of the various managers.