An overview of flood evacuation planning: Models, methods, and future directions

• The review contains 211 flood disaster-related papers and documents. • Totally 23 scholars’ experiments on flood instability are summarised and discussed. • Totally 20 algorithms for flood disasters are summarised and discussed. • Totally 7 models for evacuee evacuation movement are summarised and discussed. • Three future research directions for flood evacuation are proposed. Floods are one of the most destructive disasters and require a range of structural and non-structural measures to reduce their impacts. Evacuation is an effective non-structural measure to increase the resilience of flood-affected areas. This study aims to provide a systematic overview of evacuation planning for urban flood scenarios in terms of theories, methods, models, and techniques for both pedestrians and vehicles. The review addresses key components such as flood simulation modelling, flood hazard assessment methods, shelter identification, evacuation route development, and evacuee movement modelling. Among these, we highlight the comparison and analysis of flood hazard assessment methods, shelter optimisation and route optimisation. Additionally, a systematic analysis and comparison of evacuation shelters, evacuation route algorithms, and evacuee movement models are presented. Meta-heuristic algorithms have been shown to perform well for evacuation routes. Finally, the insights into four recent directions for enhancing evacuation plans include consideration of pedestrian and vehicle movement speeds, evacuee psychology, multimodal emergency evacuation, and the effect of overhead power lines on rescue operations.