Emergency Evacuation Modeling: A Novel Approach to Layout Designs and Evacuation Procedures

Experiment and Modelling for Pedestrian Following Behavior Using Velocity-headway Relation

To prepare for large-scale emergencies and crisis affecting communities, authorities, and emergency commanders use several types of training methods ranging from seminars to full-scale exercises. Within this continuum of exercise types, tabletop exercises (TTXs) are habitually used to familiarise participants with mitigation strategies, population management and evacuation procedures conducted as a response to natural or technological hazards. Commonly, TTXs are paper-based, and if computerised, use basic electronic maps, tend to be scripted and have a linear nature. Information flow is unidirectional as the script dictates how the exercise unfolds. These exercises have little capacity for producing qualitative or quantitative feedback related to the impact that the received scenario injects (i.e., incoming messages including scripted events and hazard locations), the authorities’ decisions, and the impact of hazards have on the wellbeing of the community and the evacuation process. While informative during training, this type of feedback may prove vital in assessing the likely impact of real incident. In this work an evacuation simulation model is proposed to augment the TTX experience in real time, offering feedback and insights on the impact that such injects, decisions and hazards have on the simulated community.The proposed methodology is utilised in an actual TTX co-organised and executed by the Municipality of Rhodes, Greece, where the evacuation model is used to (a) develop the standard, non-incident specific evacuation procedures for the Medieval City of Rhodes (MCR), (b) to adapt these procedures based on the injects (generated on-site or telecommunicated, emulating receipt from the field), producing the TTX scenario and (c) to provide information on the impact that the TTX hazards have on the evacuation process. The integration of evacuation modelling into the TTX process demonstrated that it is possible to gain a deeper understanding of the complexities related to route choices in response to path closures, the assembly and evacuation performance, as well as the management of the simulated incident by analysing qualitative and quantitative simulation results.

Experiment study on the influence of visibility on occupant evacuation in classroom is carried out. Different visibility conditions can be achieved by wearing different sunglasses or different daylight with curtains open or close. Occupant walking speed decreases with low visibility. And it is difficult to judge the evacuation routes and exit locations with low visibility. Especially when the visibility is zero, evacuation time is prolonged a lot and some special phenomenon can be found. A 2D cellular automata random model of occupant evacuation developed by our research group is used to simulate this evacuation process. Simulation results are almost consistent with the experiments.

Emergency Evacuation Model and Algorithm in the Building with Several Exits

Developing a database for emergency evacuation model

During and after any extreme event of natural or man-made origin, getting people out of harm's way and to an area of safety are primary objectives. Orderly and efficient evacuations are the key to saving lives. This was clearly demonstrated during the attacks on the Pentagon and World Trade Center towers on September 11, 2001. One of the major recommendations from the US Government’s Draft Final Report on the World Trade Center Towers collapse was that building evacuation modeling and procedures should be improved to facilitate safe and rapid egress and support better occupant preparedness for evacuation during emergencies. Performing actual physical evacuations of large occupied facilities is expensive and disruptive to occupants and visitors. Accurately evaluating the affects of various events such as loss of power, smoke, fire, explosions, chemical contamination and structural collapse on human movements is not feasible in real world evacuation exercises. This paper examines a new technology, computer-aided, intelligent agent-based evacuation modeling, that can model and help plan emergency evacuations; run numerous, accurate event-driven evacuation scenarios; support the design of egress for new facilities or facility modernizations; support research in the areas of human behavior in disaster sociology; and model the movement of first responders and security personnel.

This article presents a selected literature review of the critical studies with an analysis of the development of the study area concerned with the behaviour of the occupants during a fire occurrence. Although, the primary emphasis is on the developments in this study area within the United States from the early 1900s until 1998, the literature cited is of world wide origin. The influence of the performance code concept on tbe human behaviour in fire research with the resulting emphasis on the evacuation models is examined. Cautions are expressed relative to the design, validation and application of the evacuation models. Concerns are expressed relative to the application of the evacuation models to the simulation of the documented behaviour of occupants in fire incidents.

Simulation-aided occupant-centric building design: A critical review of tools, methods, and applications

A multi-body occupant mathematical model is developed to capture the occupant kinematics during frontal offset collision. Different cases of vehicle dynamics control systems have been used during the collision to show their effect on the occupant dynamic response. The occupant deceleration and the occupant’s chest and head rotational acceleration are used as injury criteria. It is shown from the numerical simulations that the occupant behaviour can be captured and analysed quickly and accurately. Furthermore, it is shown that the VDCS can affect the crash characteristics positively and the occupant safety is improved.

Occupants perform various actions to satisfy their physical and non-physical needs in buildings. These actions greatly affect building operations and thus energy use. Clearly understanding and accurately modelling occupant behaviour in buildings are crucial to guide energy-efficient building design and operation, and to reduce the gap between design and actual energy performance of buildings. To study and understand occupant behaviour, a cross-sectional questionnaire survey is one of the most useful tools to gain insights on general behaviour patterns and drivers, and to find connections between human, social and local comfort parameters. In this study, 33 projects were reviewed from the energy-related occupant behaviour research literature that employed cross-sectional surveys or interviews for data collection from the perspective of findings, limitations and methodological challenges. This research shows that future surveys are needed to bridge the gaps in literature but they would need to encompass a multidisciplinary approach to do so as until now only environmental and engineering factors were considered in these studies. Insights from social practice theories and techniques must be acquired to deploy robust and unbiased questionnaire results, which will provide new, more comprehensive knowledge in the field, and therefore occupant behaviour could be better understood and represented in building performance simulation to support design and operation of low or net-zero energy buildings.

The life safety assessment of evacuation under fire emergency is a popular issue in performance-based fire protection assessment and design. To address uncertainty involved in safety assessment and design, the reliability and sensitivity analysis models of occupant safety evacuation are proposed in this paper. By comparing ASET with RSET, the state of occupant safety evacuation can be determined. With the consideration of the uncertainty of variables in the limit state function, the interference characteristics of ASET and RSET can be achieved, and the reliability model of occupant evacuation is developed. Furthermore, the sensitivity analysis model is presented to evaluate the effects of stochastic variables and distribution parameters on the reliability of occupant safety evacuation. In order to illustrate the proposed method, a case study is given with a single-room building.

Accurately simulating occupant behavior is essential to improve our understanding about the future energy performance of the buildings. To date, most of the information related to the occupancy behaviors has been gathered through field observations and/or performing experiments within the lab environments. Even though these common data collection methods are effective and reliable for the existing buildings, using such data to project occupant behaviors in other contexts is likely to lead to uncertainties. The most significant theoretical achievement of this dissertation was to provide the future building occupants with thermal experience of non-physically existent environments. In this dissertation occupant behavior data was generated in an innovative experimental platform, the state-of-the-art, multi-sensory IVE within a climate chamber. This novel data collection approach allows designers to incorporate human sensation in design process and provides the possibility of examining the occupants’ thermoceptions and thermally-driven behavioral intentions in pre-occupancy stages of buildings’ life cycle. In specific, this dissertation focused on exploring the effectiveness of this new testbed in producing psychological and physiological responses that are comparable to their in-situ counterparts. Through the observations from the pilot studies, a well-grounded basis for developing a theoretical framework for the dissertation was formed, and results from the empirical evaluations and hypothesis testing of the proposed theoretical framework of the dissertation provided evidence for the ecological validity of the IVE as a scientific research tool. It was revealed that changing the indoor temperature between 65 ºF to 85 ºF has the same impact on participants’ perception of the thermal environment and physiological responses in both IVE and in-situ settings. However, some of the physiological responses at the beginning of the IVE sessions were significantly different from the in-situ sessions that could imply the availability of stress or worry. Also, the analyses of the collected sample of the dissertation showed that the variables age, computer skills and experience with virtual reality, as well as immersive tendency (entertainment) were positively, and the variable cybersickness (nausea) was negatively correlated with the consistency of thermally-driven behavioral intentions across the IVE and in-situ settings. The dissertation improved the IVE-based data collection using modeling techniques which are sensitive to the contextual factors such as the spatial, temporal and outside weather conditions. Another considerable finding of this dissertation was that the thermally-driven behavioral intentions in the IVE showed significant independence from the two periods of data collection (colder vs. warmer outside), which opposes the findings

Human behaviour and evacuation time for large underground comprehensive buildings during fire risk process

(Keywords) combinatorial optimization problem, rational construction, simulated annealing, agricultural facility, optimal layout design Abstract In this study, optimal layout design approach was used to solve problems related to site layout design of agricultural facilities such as refrigeration house, grading and packing house and warehouse. A basic program to support the rational construction of such facilities using Simulated Annealing (SA), one heuristic algorithm and one solution for combinatorial optimization problems, was coded in C language (Satake(1999)). Layout design simulations were carried out to obtain information for the development of a program for solving practical problems. And, to clarify the feasibility of applying SA to the optimal layout design problems, the layout design simulation using the hill climbing (HC), which is another heuristic algorithm, was carried out for comparison with SA. As a result of the comparison with the optimum solution by HC, the value of cost evaluation by SA using exponential annealing was lower than that of hill climbing. Furthermore, in addition to this simulation, preliminary layout design simulation was also carried out to determine the applicability of the optimal layout design simulator to practical design. In this study, the layout design for a new building and parking was carried out. In the layout design, the site is not rectangular. As a result, the optimal design satisfying our condition was obtained.

Road restraint systems are used to protect vehicle occupants if the vehicle runs off the road and potentially collides with a dangerous obstacle. These road restraint systems must successfully pass the tests defined in EN 1317, or the Manual for Assessing Safety Hardware (MASH) before they are allowed to be installed. The safety assessment is carried out according to the criteria of ASI (Acceleration Severity Index), THIV (Theoretical Head Impact Velocity), OIV (Occupant Impact Velocity), ORA (Occupant Ridedown Acceleration), and PHD (Post-Impact Head Deceleration). Usually very old vehicles are used for these tests, and there is no assessment of occupant criteria such as HIC (Head Injury Criteria), chest deflection, etc. The objective of the study was to compare the occupant safety of vehicles that are commonly used in EN 1317 with vehicles that have improved safety equipment. Test results from two different vehicles (a commonly used vehicle in EN 1317 and a vehicle with improved safety equipment) and two different impact conditions (full overlap and an overlap of 50%) were compared. Measurement data from a Hybrid HIII 50th percentile anthropomorphic test device (ATD) (Denton ATD, INC.) was recorded during the tests to assess occupant safety. The tests have shown that vehicles with improved safety equipment perform better than vehicles that are commonly used in EN 1317-3 tests. The values for the occupant safety criteria assessed were well below the Euro NCAP (New Car Assessment Programme) or Federal Motor Vehicle Safety Standard (FMVSS) limits. However, the limits of the road safety criteria were in some cases considerably exceeded regardless of the vehicle. This has been observed in particular for the offset impact condition. THIV and OIV were supposed to be able to assess the risk of head injuries. However, these two criteria correlated negatively with the head criteria, HIC or a3ms. However, a positive correlation was found for the ASI with the HIC and the a3ms head acceleration. Even if some of the criteria for road safety correlate with the criteria for occupant safety, it is doubtful whether the criteria for road safety are suitable for assessing the risk of injury to vehicle occupants.