Community dynamics in case of critical hydrogeological phenomena: Some simulated scenarios

The problem of critical floods has raised a lot of interest in the last few years, due to the significant losses they can cause, both in economic terms and especially in terms of injuries and human lives. In this work we provide some useful insights about critical weather phenomena, focusing on the strict relationship between citizens and the authority. We realized a simulative agent-based platform in which the citizens (modeled through cognitive agents) need to identify -on the basis of their information sources and of the trustworthiness attributed to them- the risks to which they are exposed and act accordingly. The main results of this work are: 1) the identification of the most significant indexes to evaluate the citizens' performance; 2) a detailed analysis of some possible strategies for the citizens and for the authority; 3) the identification of what we call"dissonance between evaluation and action", i.e. the fact that in a risky situation I could trust my sources and what they report, but still acting differently from what they suggest.