Behavioral Assessment and Optimization of Pedestrian Flood Evacuation in Historic Urban Settings: A Multiscale Simulation Approach to Risk Mitigation

Digital technologies can significantly support flood risk assessment and mitigation in Historic Urban Built Environments (HUBEs). Simulation tools can manage such complex disaster scenarios and provide useful analysis on human behaviors and evacuation strategies impact, especially when structural measures fail. This study proposes a multi-step and multi-scale tool, integrating hydrodynamic and evacuation simulations in flood-prone HUBEs, to (1) evaluate how excluding or including human behavior affect risk levels, and then (2) how emergency plan can be optimized, by testing different route choice strategies, to improve human safety. The tool combines microscopic and macroscopic models and is applied to typological HUBEs. Final comparisons with a consolidated model contribute to the tool verification, highlighting how the tool (and its single simulation components) can support decision makers in the analysis of multiple scenario and strategies conditions.