Evacuate or Stay? A Typhoon Evacuation Decision Model in China Based on the Evolutionary Game Theory in Complex Networks

The Chinese Government has played an important role in organizing the evacuation of typhoon disasters, and in-depth analysis of individual behavioral decisions is a prerequisite for adopting an effective emergency organization plan. Existing evacuation plans only consider how the Government issues the early warning and organizes the mandatory evacuation, but does not formulate effective policies to improve the efficiency of self-evacuation of evacuees and lacks the understanding of individual evacuation decision-making. Using game-based theory in a small-world network context, we build an evolutionary game model of evacuation decision diffusion between evacuees in the context of a complex network. The model simulates the effects of guaranteeing the evacuation order and providing material supplies on the evacuation decision diffusion in a small-world network in China. The results showed that various levels of policy-implementation led to different rates of evacuation. As the cost-reduction of the evacuation process increased, the evacuation response rate in the social system increased. In contrast, as the rate of reducing the non-evacuation cost decreased or the cost-reduction rate of non-evacuation increased, the evacuation response rate in the social system decreased. The study findings provided insights on emergency planning and the effectiveness of their implementation in social networks, which can be used to improve evacuation policy.