Pedestrian evacuation planning under dam-break flood disaster considering road risk and road pedestrian demand

When facing disasters, a well-planned evacuation of people can significantly reduce casualties and disaster losses. Hurricane Katrina struck New Orleans in 2005, causing multiple dam failures and resulting in Lake Pontchartrain flooding back into the city. Taking this disaster as an example, this paper evaluates the risk of pedestrian evacuation on roads during dam-break flood disasters. The evaluation considers three aspects: road evacuation difficulty, disaster risk and road pedestrian demand. The fuzzy VIKOR model was used to evaluate 8 indicators for 50 candidate shelters. A dual-objective planning model was proposed to consider the time-varying and diverse emergency needs of disaster victims. By assessing the risk of pedestrian evacuation on the road and delineating restricted areas, the optimal path distance is calculated. Pareto optimality is then employed to achieve a trade-off between the convenience, cost, and applicability of the evacuation plan. In a complex post-disaster environment, the model can adapt flexibly to emergency rescue situations at various stages by adjusting the parameters in the objective and constraint equation. The Pareto optimal frontier can assist in determining the most suitable solution for the current scenario. In the case of New Orleans, 22 and 18 shelters were respectively selected from 34 candidate shelters for evacuation based on the simulated scenarios.