In recent decades, the demands of welfare facilities for elderly people is raising rapidly in Japan. Local governments in Japan manage to supply elderly people with numerous health care services according to a new national-wide residential planning for aged population. In this research we will introduce an agentbased simulation model that can be used to help local government for getting insight on planning strategy regarding daycare center (DC center) development for elderly people through simulation, in which the simulation model of human lifecycle stage is integrated with the simulation model of DC center development and operation. Through simulating the behaviors of local government policy-maker, elderly people, daycare center owner, it is able to forecast the demand for DCs in the simulation environment. The simulation framework of the DC development and operation was designed on the rules and laws of Japan for daycare services, which follow the procedure of elderly people applying for daycare center services, government certificating them to choose and visit daycare centers and also, daycare center owners developing DC centers and operating on them. In present research, the model has been tested by using the real GIS dataset of a Japanese local city from the year to and then, further used to forecast the demand for daycare centers of local elderly people till the year. The visualized simulation results show the possibility of using this model for supporting local government to review the planning strategy on DCs.

The aim of this research is to develop a GIS-based simulation for selecting the most suitable site of solid waste landfill which could help to minimize harmful impacts to the environment and society in the extreme sensitive and complex delta by an integration of geographic information system (GIS) and analysis hierarchy process (AHP) and nine criteria (distance from surface water; depth of ground water table; distance from residential area, land use, distance from main roads, geo-environmental and geotechnical characteristics, distance from historical and tourism sites, and distance from industrial zones). Different from most of the previous studies on the landfill site selection, geology-related criteria including soil types/lithology, soil permeability, and soil depth/soil thickness (soil-structure), which are called geo-environmental and geotechnical characteristics in this research, will be carefully considered, integrated, and evaluated. The AHP was employed to determine the weight of each criterion based on pair weight comparison and its matrix, while a land suitability index (LSI) score was calculated to determine the most suitable site. Moreover, the suitability map was also created which indicated very advantageous, advantageous, rather advantageous, and disadvantageous areas in the study area for landfill siting. Finally, the developed model could be used for supporting planners, managers, policy makers, and local government to make decisions on suitable and effective planning strategies for landfill site selection and could be applied anywhere and especially in other deltas around the world.

This research aims at developing a geographic information system (GIS)–based model for integrating risk estimation for residential building damage with risk estimation for shelter capacity by number of evacuees. The former aims at predicting the number of buildings damaged by an earthquake, while the latter refers to whether each evacuation center (henceforth: shelter) has sufficient accommodation for evacuees through a simulated evacuation following an earthquake. The evacuee number, which is predicted by reference to damaged buildings and building population, is used as input data for estimating risk in relation to shelter capacity. That is, the output of risk estimation for residential building damage is an input for shelter capacity risk estimation. By making this integration, the proposed model can supply an integrated information flow for prediction, preparedness, and response in relation to potential earthquake disasters by offering, inter alia, predictions of seismic intensity, forecasts of building damage and evacuees, models of how residents move to evacuation shelters following earthquakes (evacuation simulations), and data on shelters with insufficient capacity (shelter capacity estimation). Moreover, this research also proposes a method for allocating residents to each building based on building floor area and the total population of each chome (or city district, a common administrative unit in Japan). The number of residents in each building depends on the building floor area and varies within each chome. This method of estimation differs from the average building population used in the literature, which assumes that the number of residents per building is constant throughout a chome. Furthermore, identifying the number of residents in each house or building makes it easier to predict the number of evacuees in each evacuation shelter through an evacuation simulation routing residents from their homes to the nearest shelters. The number of evacuees per shelter is then used to estimate risk in relation to shelter capacity by comparing it with the planned capacity of that shelter.

In disaster management, evacuation modeling is considered a useful visual tool to disaster managers for reviewing current evacuation strategies, estimating the ability of shelters to accommodate all evacuees, and developing evacuation route planning. Though there are several existing studies on evacuation modeling in the case of an earthquake, research that integrates road blockades into evacuation simulations is quite limited. From that viewpoint, this research aims to develop evacuation modeling with consideration of road blockades to simulate how residents move to evacuation centers (hereafter, shelters) through urban areas following an earthquake occurrence. The research also determines difficulties that residents may encounter under earthquake conditions, compared with normal conditions, corresponding to considering or not considering road blockades, respectively, such as having no access to shelters, taking longer routes instead of shortest routes, and so on. Debris from damaged buildings in an urban area is assumed as the main source of debris that would cause a road blockade. The model is applied to a case study of the Daitoku school district in Kanazawa city. According to simulated results, due to road blockades, occupants of many damaged buildings did not have access to shelters, and a lot of evacuees needed to move to shelters with longer routes instead of taking the shortest routes. Furthermore, the research results show the possibility of considering road blockades for improving current evacuation modeling and making evacuation simulations more realistic.