A modelling framework for householder decision-making for wildfire emergencies

The occurrence of wildfire threats has increased in the last few decades creating serious challenges for thousands of communities around the world. Understanding the physical and social dynamics imposed by wildfires is fundamental to assessing and reducing the ensuing risk to different communities. Although, several studies investigating household wildfire risk perception and decision-making are available in the literature, modelling solutions to predict household behaviour in wildfire scenarios are still in their early stages. Hence the lack of a behavioural model suitable for embedding within a simulation tool. In this paper, we propose a mathematical framework aimed at simulating how householders perceive the risk associated to wildfires and how they take protective actions in response to such threats. A conceptual Wildfire Decision Model, based on nine assumptions derived from existing literature on human behaviour in wildfires, is introduced. A mathematical framework is then proposed to implement such a model within a simulation tool. The proposed modelling solution can help identify the information required to generate new dynamic and behavioural travel demand models for wildfire evacuation.