Medium-Sized City Pedestrian Evacuation in a Flood Context: Simulation using an Agent Based Model

International audienceThis paper proposes a numerical simulation of a preventive pedestrian evacuation process in response to an imminent risk of dam failure. The simulation is performed in a flood context and four flooding scenarios of the involved river (the Gardon ďAlès, France) are analyzed. The aim is to evaluate the impact of such a flood on the pedestrian walkability of the road network and therefore on the time required to evacuate the population in such a context. The simulation is supported by the multi-agent platform GAMA (Taillandier et al. 2021), to which was integrated a simplified Social Force Model (Helbing and Molnár 1995). The study case is the French town of Ales, middle-sized city threatened by a dam failure and prone to heavy rainfall