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The construction of urban shelters is one of the most important work in urban planning and disaster prevention. The
spatial allocation assessment is a fundamental pre-step for spatial location-allocation of urban shelters. This paper
introduces a new method which makes use of agent-based technology to implement evacuation simulation so as to
conduct dynamic spatial allocation assessment of urban shelters. The method can not only accomplish traditional
geospatial evaluation for urban shelters, but also simulate the evacuation process of the residents to shelters. The
advantage of utilizing this method lies into three aspects: (1) the evacuation time of each citizen from a residential
building to the shelter can be estimated more reasonably; (2) the total evacuation time of all the residents in a region is
able to be obtained; (3) the road congestions in evacuation in sheltering can be detected so as to take precautionary
measures to prevent potential risks. In this study, three types of agents are designed: shelter agents, government agents
and resident agents. Shelter agents select specified land uses as shelter candidates for different disasters. Government
agents delimitate the service area of each shelter, in other words, regulate which shelter a person should take, in
accordance with the administrative boundaries and road distance between the person's position and the location of the
shelter. Resident agents have a series of attributes, such as ages, positions, walking speeds, and so on. They also have
several behaviors, such as reducing speed when walking in the crowd, helping old people and children, and so on.
Integrating these three types of agents which are correlated with each other, evacuation procedures can be simulated and
dynamic allocation assessment of shelters will be achieved. A case study in Jing'an District, Shanghai, China, was
conducted to demonstrate the feasibility of the method. A scenario of earthquake disaster which occurs in nighttime was
set to simulate the evacuation process of the residents to the earthquake shelter candidates in the study area. The
simulation results convinced that the proposed method can better evaluate the spatial configuration of urban shelter than
traditional GIS methods. The method can help local decision-makers preferably handle shelter planning and emergency
evacuation management problems. It can also be extended to conduct similar assessment work in other urban regions for
different kinds of shelters.
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