ORIGINAL RESEARCH article
Front. Phys.
Sec. Social Physics
Volume 13 - 2025 | doi: 10.3389/fphy.2025.1644312
This article is part of the Research TopicInnovative Approaches to Pedestrian Dynamics: Experiments and Mathematical ModelsView all 5 articles
The necessity of macroscopic directional guidance in pedestrian tsunami evacuation: A zonal MFD-based optimization approach
Provisionally accepted
- 1Tohoku University, Sendai, Japan
- 2Higashinihon Ryokyaku Tetsudo Kabushiki Kaisha, Shibuya, Japan
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Tsunami evacuation planning is a critical and urgent social issue that requires consideration of traffic impediments and road blockages caused by earthquakes and flooding. Traditional pedestrian evacuation models have focused primarily on micro-scale environments spanning a few dozen meters within buildings, limiting their applicability to tsunami scenarios involving travel over hundreds of meters. This study aims to (1) extend a cell FD-based dynamic traffic distribution model into a zonal MFD-based model and (2) apply it to pedestrian traffic to construct an optimization model that outputs efficient evacuation directions. Focusing on real local cities in Japan, we compare optimal solutions for different pedestrian evacuation direction scenarios. The results confirm that if pedestrians can preemptively understand multiple safe evacuation routes, rather than relying solely on the nearest facilities, efficient directional guidance that reduces congestion can be achieved.
Keywords: Tsunami evacuation, optimization, Pedestrian, Mesh-based, macroscopic guidance
Received: 10 Jun 2025; Accepted: 04 Sep 2025.
Copyright: © 2025 Horiai, Okumura and Sato. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence: Makoto Okumura, Tohoku University, Sendai, Japan
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