Seismic evacuation simulation in a dynamic indoor environment

Abstract

AbstractDuring an earthquake, interior nonstructural components of a building will be damaged. The damaged objects will obstruct pedestrians' evacuation routes and increase casualties. But this issue has received scant attention in evacuation simulation research. This paper focuses on this issue and proposes an indoor seismic evacuation model to simulate crowd evacuation in a dynamic environment. A physical model of nonstructural components is presented to simulate the dynamics of the indoor scenario. The flow field algorithm is constructed to guide pedestrian's avoidance behaviors globally to reflect the impact of environmental changes on indoor crowd path selection, and a modified social force model is built to simulate the joint influence of seismic forces and the environment on pedestrian motion states. The results of the experiments shows that the proposed model can generate realistic evacuation scene and rational evacuation routes in the earthquake.