Determining Optimal Evacuation Decision Policies For Disasters

• Main Author: Crews, Jason C.
• Other Authors: Craparo, Emily M.
• Published: Monterey, California. Naval Postgraduate School 2012
• Online Access: http://hdl.handle.net/10945/6782

Approved for public release; distribution is unlimited === 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.