Pre-evacuation Time Estimation Based Emergency Evacuation Simulation in Urban Residential Communities.

Chen Chen,Yin Yin,Zhang Zhang,Yu Yu,Yao Yao,Wu Wu,Wen Wen

doi:10.3390/ijerph16234599

Abstract

The timely and secure evacuation of an urban residential community is crucial to residents’ safety when emergency events happen. This is different to evacuation of office spaces or schools, emergency evacuation in residential communities must consider the pre-evacuation time. The importance of estimating evacuation time components has been recognized for approximately 40 years. However, pre-evacuation time is rarely discussed in previous community-scale emergency evacuation studies. This paper proposes a new method that estimates the pre-evacuation time, which makes the evacuation simulation in urban residential communities more realistic. This method integrates the residents’ pre-evacuation behavior data obtained by surveys to explore the influencing factors of pre-evacuation time and builds a predictive model to forecast pre-evacuation times based on the Random Forest algorithm. A sensitivity analysis is also conducted to find the critical parameters in evacuation simulations. The results of evacuation simulations in different scenarios can be compared to identify potential evacuation problems. A case study in Luoshanqicun Community, Pudong New District, Shanghai, China, was conducted to demonstrate the feasibility of the proposed method. The simulation results showed that the pre-evacuation times have significant impacts on the simulation procedure, including the total evacuation time, the congestion time and the congestion degree. This study can help to gain a deeper understanding of residents’ behaviors under emergencies and improve emergency managements of urban communities.

Highlights

Emergency management is crucial to preventing potential risks in urban communities [1]
Compared with other existing relevant research, it is not the first evacuation simulation which includes the pre-departure evacuation time estimation component [26], the main contributions of this study are as follows: (1) The proposed method can predict short pre-evacuation times in emergency evacuation simulations in urban communities, which is more realistic than traditional simulation methods
This study proposed a new method to address the evacuation problem of a vertical building evacuation followed by a small-scale horizontal pedestrian area evacuation, which integrated the pre-evacuation time estimation and made evacuation simulations in urban residential communities more realistic

Summary

Introduction

Emergency management is crucial to preventing potential risks in urban communities [1]. In high-density urban communities, efficient, safe and timely evacuation is important for guaranteeing the safety of residents in emergencies [2,3]. Various emergency evacuation studies have been done all over the world. Many researchers conducted small-scale evacuations inside single buildings [4,5,6], while many other scholars developed evacuation optimization models on large-scale evacuations as well [7,8,9]. Only a few studies have attempted to analyze emergency evacuations in urban residential communities with a consideration for residents’ behaviors from a microscopic perspective.

Methods

Findings

Discussion

Conclusion