Emergency relocation: Population response model to disasters

This paper presents a a general framework for applying individual decision models to aggregated populations. Our approach is useful for modeling and predicting evacuation decisions from disasters, ranging from earthquakes, flooding and wild fires, to industrial emergencies like chemical spills or nuclear accidents, to reactions to terrorism attacks. The novelty of our approach is to apply well-documented household evacuation behavioral models to statistical accurate synthetic populations with detailed demographic information. Predictions of who evacuates and who does not evacuate, and the type and location of the selected shelters is useful for emergency management and planning. We illustrate it by applying our tools to predict emergency relocation behavior from hurricanes.