evacuation-based design of urban regions for earthquake disaster

City design involves various parameters such as appropriate positioning of municipal facilities, residential regions, and public centers. when a city is faced with a disaster, it should be robust enough to minimize the rate of fatalities. in this line, emergency relief and urgent evacuation are among the key activities shall be addressed for an emergency management strategy. this paper focuses on the design of an assumed city when evacuation action after earthquake is directly addressed. for doing this, key risks associated with evacuation activities are first identified. the identified risks are then analyzed using fault tree techniques. defining risk criteria between 0.1 and 0.9—where 0.1 means low risk, 0.1–0.3 means acceptable risk, 0.3–0.6 means considerable risk and more than 0.6 means extremely high risk—it is thus understood whether the risk are acceptable. the city is then designed in a way when an evacuation activity is required to performed; the risk associated becomes in an acceptable range. to do this, three distinct zones with different residential and public centers are positioned within the boundary of the city based on which the locations and directions of the connective routes are set up. the results show that the risk of the city based on evacuation is as low as 0.28, which is within the acceptable criterion.