Dhirendra Singh

Junfeng Wu, Xiangmin Zhou, Erica Kuligowski et al.

Traditional data sources on bushfire evacuation behaviour, such as quantitative surveys and manual observations have severe limitations. Mining social media data related to bushfire evacuations promises to close this gap by allowing the collection and processing of a large amount of behavioural data, which are low-cost, accurate, possibly including location information and rich contextual information. However, social media data have many limitations, such as being scattered, incomplete, informal, etc. Together, these limitations represent several challenges to their usefulness to better understand bushfire evacuation. To overcome these challenges and provide guidance on which and how social media data can be used, this scoping review of the literature reports on recent advances in relevant data mining techniques. In addition, future applications and open problems are discussed. We envision future applications such as evacuation model calibration and validation, emergency communication, personalised evacuation training, and resource allocation for evacuation preparedness. We identify open problems such as data quality, bias and representativeness, geolocation accuracy, contextual understanding, crisis-specific lexicon and semantics, and multimodal data interpretation.

Afshin Jafari, Dhirendra Singh, Alan Both et al.

Agent-based and activity-based models for simulating transportation systems have attracted significant attention in recent years. Few studies, however, include a detailed representation of active modes of transportation - such as walking and cycling - at a city-wide level, where dominating motorised modes are often of primary concern. This paper presents an open workflow for creating a multi-modal agent-based and activity-based transport simulation model, focusing on Greater Melbourne, and including the process of mode choice calibration for the four main travel modes of driving, public transport, cycling and walking. The synthetic population generated and used as an input for the simulation model represented Melbourne's population based on Census 2016, with daily activities and trips based on the Victoria's 2016-18 travel survey data. The road network used in the simulation model includes all public roads accessible via the included travel modes. We compared the output of the simulation model with observations from the real world in terms of mode share, road volume, travel time, and travel distance. Through these comparisons, we showed that our model is suitable for studying mode choice and road usage behaviour of travellers.

Alan Both, Dhirendra Singh, Afshin Jafari et al.

In this paper, we present an activity-based model for the Greater Melbourne area, using a combination of hierarchical clustering, probabilistic, and gravity-based approaches. The model outlines steps for generating a synthetic population-a list of agents with their demographic attributes-and for assigning activity patterns, schedules, as well as activity locations and modes of travel for each trip. In our model, individuals are assigned activity chains based on the probabilities of their respective demographic clusters, as informed by observed data. Tours and trips then emanate from these assigned activities. This is innovative compared to the common practice of creating trips or tours first and attaching activities thereafter. Furthermore, when selecting activity locations, our model incorporates both the distance-decay of trip lengths and the activity-based attraction of destination sites. This results in areas with higher attractiveness for various activities showing a greater likelihood of being selected. Additionally, when assigning the location for the next activity, we take into account the number of activities an agent has remaining to ensure they do not opt for a location that would be impractical for a return trip home. Our methodology is open and replicable, requiring only publicly available data and is designed to produce outcomes compatible with commonly used agent-based modeling software such as MATSim. Each sub-model is calibrated to match observed data in terms of activity types, start and end times, and durations.

Dhirendra Singh, Ken Strahan, Jim McLennan et al.

A decade on from the devastating Black Saturday bushfires in Victoria, Australia, we are at a point where computer simulations of community evacuations are starting to be used within the emergency services. While fire progression modelling is embedded in strategic and operational settings at all levels of government across Victoria, modelling of community response to such fires is only just starting to be evaluated in earnest. For community response models to become integral to bushfire planning and preparedness, the key question to be addressed is: when faced with a bushfire, what will a community really do? Typically this understanding has come from local experience and expertise within the community and services, however the trend is to move towards more informed data driven approaches. In this paper we report on the latest work within the emergency sector in this space. Particularly, we discuss the application of Strahan et al.'s self-evacuation archetypes to an agent-based model of community evacuation in regional Victoria. This work is part of the consolidated bushfire evacuation modelling collaboration between several emergency management stakeholders.