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(Ed.)
We study evacuation dynamics in a major urban region (Mi-
ami, 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.
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