An enhanced model for evacuation vulnerability assessment in urban areas

Rapid urbanization has led to a massive influx of people into cities. When many people congregate in urban areas, crowd crushing emergencies are likely to occur. If vulnerable areas with potential evacuation problems are detected in advance, crowd crushing emergencies may be minimized or even avoided. Thus, an evacuation vulnerability assessment from a precautionary perspective is fundamental. However, the current evacuation vulnerability assessment models are limited in spreading time estimation and evacuation capacity evaluation. To mitigate these limitations, in this study, we propose an enhanced model to quantitatively assess the evacuation vulnerability in urban areas. Our model enhances the current models in two ways. First, we employ a hexagon gridding scheme to construct a network to meet the prerequisite of evacuation spreading at the equal time intervals. Second, we quantify the grid connectivity on the network by considering the grid capacity to avoid underestimation of the evacuation vulnerability. Using a mobile phone location dataset of Shanghai, we systematically investigate the evacuation vulnerability of urban areas in a fine-grained spatio-temporal scale. Areas that may encounter evacuation problems to various degrees can be identified in advance. This information can support emergency management agencies in monitoring dense crowds and ensure early warnings of potential crowd crushing emergencies.