Determining Optimal Evacuation Decision Policies for Disasters

Abstract

Decision making in the face of uncertainty is a difficult task, and this is exacerbated when the decision is irreversible, it involves a near-term deadline, and/or the cost of a bad decision is high. Deciding whether to stay or evacuate from an impending natural disaster is difficult for all of these reasons. This thesis explores the evacuation decision as a Markov decision problem. We develop a generic disaster model to explore the tensions and tradeoffs in the decision to evacuate, and use a dynamic programming algorithm to determine optimal decision policies for the decision maker. We explore how these policies are affected by evacuation costs as well as disaster uncertainty.

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Document Details

Document Type
Technical Report
Publication Date
Mar 01, 2012
Accession Number
ADA560586

Entities

People

  • Jason C. Crews

Organizations

  • Naval Postgraduate School

Tags

Communities of Interest

  • Human Systems
  • Weapons Technologies

DTIC Thesaurus Topics

  • Computational Fluid Dynamics
  • Department Of Defense
  • Dynamic Programming
  • Floods
  • Governments
  • Hit Probabilities
  • Natural Disasters
  • Operations Research
  • Particle Trajectories
  • Probabilistic Models
  • Probability
  • Random Variables
  • Random Walk
  • River Flooding
  • Stochastic Processes
  • Two Dimensional
  • United States

Fields of Study

  • Computer science

Readers

  • Adaptive Control and Estimation with Uncertainty in Dynamic Systems.
  • Emergency Management and Homeland Security.
  • Systems Analysis and Design