Spatial Allocation of Shelters Considering the Blockage Effect on Roads during an Earthquake

Abstract

The reasonable spatial allocation of shelters in key urban areas and the improvement of the evacuation efficiency are critical agendas in the field of earthquake mitigation and resilient cities. Based on the conventional shelter location model, which ignores blocked roads and has deficiencies on the computational accuracy of evacuation demands and evacuation environment, this study proposes an advanced methodology for the spatial allocation of shelters considering the blockage effect on roads under earthquakes. First, based on the elastic-plastic analysis of building groups, the damage condition of each building under different seismic intensities and the influence range of falling components on evacuation roads are determined. Second, the evacuation demands are identified with an accuracy at the building scale. Third, this study proposed the hybrid cellular automata evacuation model, which combines the merits of the microscopic evacuation and macroscopic evacuation models. The proposed model not only reflects the evacuation behavior of refugees and but also has acceptable computational efficiency. Fourth, the shelter quantity is taken as the optimization objective to complete the spatial allocation of shelters via a cyclic verification and simulations for regional evacuations. Finally, Yangbi City, Yunan Province, China is employed as a case study to prove the effectiveness of the proposed method.