Agent-based simulator of dynamic flood-people interactions

TL;DR

This paper introduces a GPU-accelerated agent-based simulator that models the complex interactions between floodwaters and people in crowded environments, aiding in evacuation planning and safety interventions.

Contribution

It presents a novel coupled hydrodynamic and pedestrian agent-based model implemented in FLAMEGPU, capable of simulating flood-people interactions in real-time for emergency planning.

Findings

Simulator accurately models flood and evacuation dynamics.

Effective in planning interventions like barriers.

Provides detailed spatiotemporal evacuation statistics.

Abstract

This paper presents a new simulator for dynamic modelling of interactions between flooding and people in crowded areas. The simulator is developed in FLAMEGPU (a Flexible Large scale Agent-based Modelling Environment for the GPU), which allows to model multiple agent interactions while benefitting from the speed-up of GPUs. Flooding variables including terrain data are represented by a hydrodynamic Agent-Based Model (ABM) that is based on a non-sequential implementation of a robust Finite Volume (FV) solver of the Shallow Water Equations (SWEs). People movements are represented by a pedestrian ABM adopting force-based walking rules. The hydrodynamic ABM is coupled to the pedestrian ABM according to risk-to-life thresholds reported by the UK Environment Agency (EA). A hypothetical case study of a crowded shopping centre is proposed and used to assess the dynamic coupling ability of the simulator. Flooding into the shopping centre is induced based on realistic inflow conditions, and the simulator is applied considering two scenarios: evacuation without advanced warning and intervention with an advanced warning of 12 hours. Results show that the simulator can produce detailed statistics of spatiotemporal people states during evacuation, and is useful to plan safe and effective people intervention to deploy a sandbag-based temporary barriers.