DOI: 10.3390/su18136573 ISSN: 2071-1050

Agent-Based Simulation and Mechanism Identification of Evacuation Efficiency in a Typical Built-Up Area Within a Desert Corridor County: A Case Study of Ruoqiang, Xinjiang

Ling Yang, Junliang Wang, Longhui He, Dongwei Huo, Shanshan Jiang, Hao Wu

Research on evacuation in built-up areas within corridor-dependent counties is shifting from static shelter-coverage assessment toward dynamic simulation of spatial constraints, behavioral heterogeneity, and organizational capacity. This study takes a typical built-up area within Ruoqiang County, Xinjiang, as the simulation unit, rather than the entire county administrative area. GIS-based shortest-path analysis shows that the origin-to-nearest-shelter distance ranges from approximately 0.03 km to 0.64 km, indicating a short-distance pedestrian evacuation context. Based on multi-source spatial data from 2025, this study constructs an agent-based evacuation simulation framework and positions the model as a general evacuation-capacity experiment rather than a predictive simulation of a specific hazard process. Five scenarios are compared: fully disordered, 25% ordered, 50% ordered, 75% ordered, and fully ordered evacuation. Under the ideal ordered-information assumption, the simulated system reaches complete evacuation within 9.25 min, whereas the fully disordered scenario enters a low-level plateau after approximately 4.88 min, with a final evacuation rate of about 13%. The 25%, 50%, and 75% ordered scenarios reach plateau levels of approximately 37–38%, 61–62%, and 71–72%, respectively. Origin-type results further indicate that origins near shelters, directly connected to shelters, or embedded in continuous road networks respond more strongly to improved organization, whereas origins near boundaries, in low-connectivity areas, far from shelters, or adjacent to bottleneck nodes are more likely to generate late-stage retention. This study reveals how destination cognition, route organization, and origin spatial conditions jointly shape evacuation efficiency in a typical built-up area within a corridor-dependent county under specified scenario assumptions.

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