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Title: Effect of Peer Influence and Looting Concerns on Evacuation Behavior During Natural Disasters
We study evacuation dynamics in a major urban region (Miami, FL) using a combination of a realistic population and social contact network, and an agent-based model of evacuation behavior that takes into account peer influence and concerns of looting. These factors have been shown to be important in prior work, and have been modeled as a threshold-based network dynamical systems model (2mode-threshold), which involves two threshold parameters|for a family's decision to evacuate and to remain in place for looting and crime concerns|based on the fraction of neighbors who have evacuated. The dynamics of such models are not well understood, and we observe that the threshold parameters have a significant impact on the evacuation dynamics. We also observe counter-intuitive effects of increasing the evacuation threshold on the evacuated fraction in some regimes of the model parameter space, which suggests that the details of realistic networks matter in designing policies.  more » « less
Award ID(s):
1916670
NSF-PAR ID:
10310237
Author(s) / Creator(s):
; ; ; ; ; ;
Date Published:
Journal Name:
Complex Networks and their Applications
Format(s):
Medium: X
Sponsoring Org:
National Science Foundation
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