Evaluating human behaviour during a disaster evacuation process: A literature review

Abstract

The frequency of natural and man-made disasters has increased over the past few decades, which has doubled the significance of evacuation planning because it directly affects people's lives and properties. How evacuees behave during a disaster and the methodologies to assess their behaviour are vital factors in managing any emergency scenario. For example, during the evacuation of a transportation network, users' amount of information and how they react are imperative to achieve a resilient response to a disaster. Even though there are numerous approaches for assessing evacuee behaviour, further research is needed to determine how and when each methodology should be employed. This paper intends to evaluate and classify the methodologies that have been presented up to date to create a more consistent approach to interpreting human behaviour during an evacuation process. The majority of studies focus on how people behave during an evacuation of a building, with less attention paid to how they behave during a transport evacuation. Among the proposed methodologies in this paper, the virtual reality approach, in individual behaviour, and agent-based models, in crowd behaviour, have more advantages than other approaches. Overall, a comparison between the proposed approaches is made in the discussion part. The output of this study provides the classifications and suggestions for researchers to pick an appropriate approach based on the types of problems, and some direction for future studies are introduced. To reach the research goal, 177 papers have been reviewed between 1954 and 2022.