Our algorithms have led to fundamental insights about evacuations and human behaviour. Letting every individual decide when, where and how to evacuate can have disastrous consequences.
In the Hawkesbury Nepean flood scenario, if everyone leaves at a reasonable time and goes to the closest evacuation shelter, more than 60% of the population will not reach safety and will end up trapped by major traffic jams.
It is not surprising that independent decisions by 70,000 individuals do not lead to an effective evacuation – but our algorithms evacuate every single person.
Even better, if as many as half of the population does not follow the plan exactly but leaves at the time it is instructed to, 97% of evacuees will reach safety.
Equally interesting is the fact that most existing evacuation algorithms are too optimistic: they delay the evacuation too much and, as a result, a substantial portion of the population cannot be evacuated.
After the 2005 Hurricane Katrina, the US recognised the need to go beyond situational awareness and to adapt for disaster management the optimisation algorithms used in airlines, logistic systems, and supply chains.
Technological advances may have significant impact, and save numerous lives, in Australia and the Asia-Pacific region. The next step, of course, is convincing more governments around the world to deploy them.