ORIGINAL PAPER An agent-based evacuation model for the 2011 Brisbane City-scale riverine flood Xuefen Liu 1 • Samsung Lim 1 Received: 19 April 2017 / Accepted: 22 May 2018 Ó Springer Science+Business Media B.V., part of Springer Nature 2018 Abstract In this study, an agent-based model is proposed in order to provide new insights into the policy analysis and strategy assessment of city-scale evacuation management. The pro- posed model is suitable for assessment of the influence of different departure times and communications among peer evacuees on the number of residents at risk who arrive at official shelters. A case study is applied to build a simulation model for the coastal city of Brisbane in Australia. The Brisbane River catchment experiences regular flooding almost every year; the second severest flood since the twentieth century occurred in 2011. During that event, over 15,000 properties were inundated and around 3600 households evacuated in metropolitan Brisbane alone. Making use of high-performance computing clusters, the evacuation simulation was coupled with results from a validated hydrodynamic model to test a variety of escaping scenarios based on the 2011 flood situation. This case study demonstrates the proposed model’s capacity to represent the dynamic evacuation process and also shows that the model is able to help develop flood emergency plans and evaluate response measures through exploring key elements in a range of scenarios. Keywords City-scale evacuation Á Evacuation modelling Á Agent-based modelling Á Flood dynamics Á Flood response management 1 Introduction Large-scale floods have been frequently observed in recent years (Keating et al. 2014). Evacuation actions in a flooding situation might involve moving people from inundated areas to specific assembly locations (evacuation centres) and providing them with accommodation for a short- or long-term period. There are a number of studies that used evacuation models to inform responses to floods (La ¨mmel et al. 2010; Lumbroso and Davison 2018; Mas et al. 2015; Zheng 2013). Evacuation modelling is essential for & Xuefen Liu xuefen.liu@student.unsw.edu.au Samsung Lim s.lim@unsw.edu.au 1 School of Civil and Environmental Engineering, University of New South Wales, Sydney, NSW 2052, Australia 123 Natural Hazards https://doi.org/10.1007/s11069-018-3373-1