Sustainable Humanitarian Operations: Multi-Method Simulation for Large-Scale Evacuation

Integrating sustainability in humanitarian operations has been seen as a promising approach toward effective and long-term solutions. During disaster emergency management, the evacuation determines the risk of loss in a disaster. To better understand the effectiveness of the evacuation plan while considering the sustainability standpoint, this paper develops a multi-method simulation (MMS) approach to evaluate evacuation time, load balance of the shelters, and CO2 emission. The MMS integrating Agent-Based Modeling (ABM) and Discrete-Event Simulation (DES) incorporates evacuation decision-making and evacuation processes. Comparative analysis shows that the MMS outperforms the use of ABM solely. The simulation results indicate over-utilization and imbalanced load among the shelters, implying a need to expand shelters’ capacity and to revisit the evacuation plan concerning the location of the assembly points and the shelters and the resource allocation. Evacuation behavior heading to the nearest assembly point instead of the designated assembly point based on the evacuation plan worsens the imbalanced load among the shelters and results in higher CO2 emissions by 8%. The results demonstrate the necessity to include evacuation decision-making (social dimension) on top of the technical dimension and to adopt sustainable performance indicators in planning the evacuation sustainably. Avenues for future research are also discussed.