Flood Emergency Management: A case study of the use of a Decision Support System in the City of Gold Coast, Australia.

This work wants to, in a first place, provide the readers a general picture of the analysed environment of Gold Coast, Australia, with its meteorological characteristics, therefore the needs to undertake a study on emergency flood management, and best practices in logistics during emergency situations put in place by NGOs and private companies. Furthermore, an inspection of differences and similarities between Business and Humanitarian Supply Chains is undertaken. It is thus discussed the impacts that disasters, such as the 2010-2011 Queensland floods, may have on both infrastructures and communities; afterwards the consequent inferred challenges of achieving a suitable resilience for cities and buildings in the particular zone of Gold Coast (Queensland, Australia) is. The last part of this work wants to holistically explore how simulation techniques such as prescriptive Agent-Based Models (ABM) can have a role in both the operational side of Emergency Management and in urban planning. In doing this, an ABM simulating the behavior of people during an evacuation has been developed on AnyLogic.