Chapter 11: The MATSim Network Flow Model for Traffic Simulation Adapted to Large-Scale Emergency Egress and an Application to the Evacuation of the Indonesian City of Padang in Case of a Tsunami Warning

The evacuation of whole cities or even regions is an important problem, as demonstrated by recent events such as the evacuation of Houston in the case of hurricane Rita or the evacuation of coastal cities in the case of tsunamis. This paper describes a complex evacuation simulation framework for the city of Padang, with approximately 1,000,000 inhabitants. Padang faces a high risk of being inundated by a tsunami wave. The evacuation simulation is based on the MATSim framework for large-scale transport simulations. Different optimization parameters like evacuation distance, evacuation time, or the variation of the advance warning time are investigated. The results are given as overall evacuation times, evacuation curves, and detailed GIS analysis of the evacuation directions. All these results are discussed with regard to their usability for evacuation recommendations.