Emergency Evacuation Analysis Research Articles

Dynamic analysis of emergency evacuation in a rolling passenger ship using a two-layer social force model

It is vital to effectively quantify the human movement parameters in rolling ships to save lives in maritime emergency and/or accidents. This study aims to develop a new two-layer social force model (2LR-SFM) to improve human evacuation efficiency in rolling ships. Firstly, the forces acting on humans are analysed in terms of physical forces, psychological adjustment, and inertial analysis, and the three-dimensional human moving process is described by a modified model. Secondly, the individual’s velocity and acceleration are calculated at each time step according to the walking direction, rolling amplitude, and rolling period. Thirdly, the accuracy of the human walking speed attenuation in 2LR-SFM simulation is verified by using the velocity data collected from real ship experiments. Finally, simulations are carried out in the dining room of a ship to reveal the human movement patterns in different rolling scenarios. The results reveal that the simulation process of 2LR-SFM satisfies the basic rules of human evacuation. With the increase of rolling amplitude, humans are more affected by the rolling motion, resulting in exponentially increased evacuation time. This study enables to simulate the evacuation process under different rolling scenarios and hence realizes a dynamic analysis for the first time in the area.

SEEVis: A Smart Emergency Evacuation Plan Visualization System with Data‐Driven Shot Designs

AbstractDespite the significance of tracking human mobility dynamics in a large‐scale earthquake evacuation for an effective first response and disaster relief, the general understanding of evacuation behaviors remains limited. Numerous individual movement trajectories, disaster damages of civil engineering, associated heterogeneous data attributes, as well as complex urban environment all obscure disaster evacuation analysis. Although visualization methods have demonstrated promising performance in emergency evacuation analysis, they cannot effectively identify and deliver the major features like speed or density, as well as the resulting evacuation events like congestion or turn‐back. In this study, we propose a shot design approach to generate customized and narrative animations to track different evacuation features with different exploration purposes of users. Particularly, an intuitive scene feature graph that identifies the most dominating evacuation events is first constructed based on user‐specific regions or their tracking purposes on a certain feature. An optimal camera route, i.e., a storyboard is then calculated based on the previous user‐specific regions or features. For different evacuation events along this route, we employ the corresponding shot design to reveal the underlying feature evolution and its correlation with the environment. Several case studies confirm the efficacy of our system. The feedback from experts and users with different backgrounds suggests that our approach indeed helps them better embrace a comprehensive understanding of the earthquake evacuation.

Analysis of emergency evacuation in an offshore platform using evacuation simulation modeling

The evacuation routes which are selected by crew will affect their evacuation efficiency when an offshore platform under emergency conditions. To quantify the influence of evacuation route selection on crew evacuation efficiency, two scenarios are considered: Scenario1 is that crew independently select the evacuation routes to evacuate to the assembling point, Scenario 2 is that crew evacuate to the assembling point in accordance with the prescribed evacuation routes. The evacuation efficiency of these two evacuation scenarios is analyzed and discussed from the aspect of evacuation time, waiting time index (WTI), optimal performance statistic (OPS), mean non-flow statistic (MNS) and casualty, respectively. It is found that the evacuation time of crew in Scenario 1 reaches 255.09 s, but Scenario 2 is 32.84 s shorter. By analyzing the WTI of each evacuation exit in these two evacuation scenarios, a large number of people in Scenario 1 are congested at the exit 1, which is the main reason for the increase of evacuation time of Scenario 1. Moreover, the comparison of the OPS and MNS of these two evacuation scenarios indicates that crew in Scenario 1 have not made full use of evacuation exit resources and make it impossible for crew to reach the assembling points timely. Furthermore, in Scenario 1, there are ten crew unable to reach the primary assembling point in time. Scenario 2, however, suffers no casualties.

Development of urban disaster evacuation model using Cube Avenue

On account of industrialization and automobiles all over the world, air pollution is getting worse and climate warming is ongoing. Therefore, a disaster evacuation plan which is the most important factor in a disaster situation has been also under the spotlight. The total damages by the natural or man-made disasters during the past years resulted in tremendous fatalities and recovery costs. It is necessary to have efficient emergency evacuation management which is concerned with estimating the time to evacuate the disaster and identifying the bottleneck. Most of the studies related to domestic disaster evacuation models were mainly for indoor space or structure and mainly focused on the disaster evacuation in indoor using micro simulation software. There are few cases where a disaster evacuation model is applied to a city or a wide area. Therefore, the purpose of this study is to construct a medium scale urban disaster evacuation model for dynamic analysis that can utilize data and network of existing macro demand model to save time and budget by using Cube Avenue and performed evacuation simulation, targeting road network in Gangnam-gu, Seoul. Consequently, suggested a model in this study is used to carry out a dynamic analysis using the network and the input variable of existing travel demand model. The results of this study show that the model is an appropriate tool for an areawide emergency evacuation analysis to save time and cost. Henceforth, the results of this study can be applied for the development of the consulting industry in the urban and transportation fields through the development of the disaster management policy evaluation model in relation to the disaster management policy evaluation in Korea.

The effects of cultural differences between the us and saudi arabia on emergency evacuation—Analysis of self reported recogntion/reaction times and cognitive state

Engineers rely on studies that publish building evacuation data from various occupancies when conducting an egress analysis; this usually includes the people’s pre-movement and movement times. However, much of the available data was collected in Western cultures, such as the U.S., which brings into question their validity to other non-Western cultures, such as Saudi Arabia. This study examines how cultural differences between the U.S. and Saudi Arabia can affect occupants’ self-reported recognition/reaction times, and the cognitive state of occupants during a fire drill. The results of this research indicate that the U.S. populations are more likely to recognize and react to a fire alarm faster than the Saudi populations during a fire drill.

Cube Avenue 시뮬레이션 모델을 이용한 중규모 재난대피 프로토타입 모델 연구

Recently, the number of disasters has been seriously increasing. The total damages by the natural or man-made disasters during the past years resulted in tremendous fatalities and recovery costs. It is necessary to have efficient emergency evacuation management which is concerned with identifying evacuation route, and the estimation of evacuation and clearance times. An emergency evacuation model is important in identifying critical locations, and developing various evacuation strategies. In that existing evacuation models have focused on route analysis for indoor evacuation, there are only a few models for areawide emergency evacuation analysis. Therefore, we developed a mesoscopic model by using Cube Avenue and performed evacuation simulation, targeting road network in City of Fargo, North Dakota. Consequently, a mesoscopic model developed in this study is used to carry out dynamic analysis using network and input variable of existing travel demand model. The results of this study show that the model is an appropriate tool for areawide emergency evacuation analysis to save time and cost. Henceforth, the results of this study can be applied to develop a disaster evacuation model which can be used for a variety of disaster simulation and evaluation based on scenarios in the local metropolitan area.

Fire emergency evacuation simulation based on integrated fire–evacuation model with discrete design method

Emergency evacuation under fire condition in a mass transit station is a great concern especially in developing countries. The interaction between fire and human is very important in the analysis of emergency evacuation under fire condition. An integrated fire–human model, FDS + Evac, is widely used to solve numerically the simultaneous fire and evacuation processes. However, when the simulation runs increase, the simulation time and cost will increase dramatically. The use of discrete design method (DDM) to reduce the simulation time and cost in fire emergency evacuation simulations is proposed. The method is applied to an underground subway station to study the influence of different factors on fire emergency evacuation. The grid resolution is analyzed to determine an appropriate grid size that will optimize the solution accuracy and time. Different fire locations, heat release rates, occupant loadings, ventilation conditions and material properties are considered under fire condition in the underground subway station. It shows that the heat release rate has a weak influence on fire emergency evacuation, but the fire location, occupant loading, ventilation condition and material property have a great influence on fire emergency evacuation. Furthermore, the five parameters have a coupled function on fire emergency evacuation.

Comparison analysis of emergency evacuation between computer simulations and real exercises for large-space buildings

Due to the high capacity of large buildings, any defective designs in their evacuation facilities may result in massive casualties. In the past, many disasters were caused by ineffective emergency evacuation of large crowds. However, presently, related evacuation studies all have their limitations and problems, such as difficulties and financial constraints for executing full-scale evacuation exercise, moral issues arose from real-life simulation exercises, and neglecting software analysis processes. This research focused on emergency evacuation for large-space gymnasiums and addressed to three major issues: unreliability of computer software simulations, moral risk of real-life exercises and whether or not the scale of large crowd evacuation equivalent to that of the same size crowd exiting. Then, computerized simulation analyses are conducted with two commonly used softwares, such as Simulex and Exodus. Results showed a great variance of risk-bearing value is yielded from different software analysis processes. Also, the authors propose the concept of ‘Hot Area’ replacement exercise to decrease the impact of moral and economic issues. Ultimately, it is found that the exiting time of 2089 people differed 45% from software simulation results. Hence, it is concluded that large-scale crowd exiting does not equal to evacuation of the same number of people.

Simulation Analysis of Emergency Evacuation on Large Passenger Rail Terminal

Emergency evacuation of large passenger station passenger terminal operations management is an important part of management. In this paper, it use legion simulation software, on the Beijing South Railway Station passenger emergency evacuation simulation test, first introduced the Legion simulation software and simulation process, followed by the design of the total number of 5000 and 10,000 people in different device configurations evacuation simulation program; re-use simulation software legion For each program the simulation analysis, the number of the simulation program evacuation and evacuation density optimization Finally, emergency evacuation measures and proposals for the reasonable development of passenger flow planning and organization of decision support programs.

Application of Code Approach for Emergency Evacuation in a Rail Station

This paper presents an emergency evacuation analysis during a mid-platform train fire in an underground rail station. A time-based evacuation scenario is developed taking into account the stairway inaccessibility due to smoke blockage. The calculation approach in NFPA 130 is then applied to a parametric study of this time-based scenario and its reliability is examined using a micro-simulation model. Both methods give consistent predictions of the exiting times. The results demonstrate that with the division of the station into two zones, the exiting time could not meet the code requirements, whereas it does meet the required exiting time without the division. Such division is due to smoke blockage and creates an uneven ratio of the occupant load to the available exiting capacity. This shows that appropriate consideration of the fire and smoke effects is important for station egress evaluation. Other issues such as the fire growth rate and the pre-evacuation time are also discussed.