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<p>Decision making in the face of uncertainty is a difficult task, and this is exacerbated when the decision is irreversible, it
involves a near-term deadline, and/or the cost of a bad decision is high. Deciding whether to stay or evacuate from an
impending natural disaster is difficult for all of these reasons. This thesis explores the evacuation decision as a Markov
decision problem. We develop a generic disaster model to explore the tensions and tradeoffs in the decision to evacuate and
use a dynamic programming algorithm to determine optimal decision policies for the decision maker. We explore how these
policies are affected by evacuation costs as well as disaster uncertainty.
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<br>Subjects:</div>
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Crews, Jason C.</div>
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