Demand Stratification and Prediction of Evacuees after Earthquakes

Abstract

In recent years, frequent natural disasters have brought huge losses to human lives and property, directly affecting social stability and economic development. Since the driving factor of disaster management operations is speed, it will face severe challenges and tremendous pressure when matching the supply of emergency resources with the demand. However, it is difficult to figure out the demands of the affected area until the initial post-disaster assessment is completed and demand is constantly changing. The focus of this paper is to stratify the evacuation needs and predict the number of evacuees and supplies demanded after an earthquake. This research takes a large-scale earthquake as an example to analyze the characteristics of evacuation demand stratification and the factors that affect the demands of evacuees. The forecast model for the number of evacuees is selected and improved. Moreover, combining the influencing factors of materials demand and the number of evacuees, a forecast model of materials demand for evacuees is constructed. The proposed model is used in the case of the Ya’an earthquake in China to estimate the number of evacuees and the daily need for emergency supplies.