Evacuation Path Research Articles

Experimental investigation of pedestrian evacuation using an extra-long steep-slope evacuation path in a high altitude tunnel fire

This paper presents outcomes of a field experiment involving a random sample of pedestrians evacuating from a newly-constructed long tunnel at high altitude through an extra-long evacuation path with a steep grade. Adverse survival conditions include high altitude, reduced oxygen, long distance, and the steep slope of the evacuation path. Research methods include field experiments, questionnaires and interviews. Response time, route choice, movement time, speed change, and reaction to technical installations were recorded and discussed both in the tunnel and the evacuation path. The influence of adverse survival conditions was analyzed and compared with general evacuation cases. The human factors, including pedestrians’ genders, ages and emotional states were also investigated. The results of this study have resulted in guidance on evacuation planning and procedures and suggestions regarding technical installations in the tunnel, such as way-finding signs, loudspeakers, continuous lights and handrails.

Tunnel Fire Dynamics as a Function of Longitudinal Ventilation Air Oxygen Content

Longitudinal ambient air ventilation is the most common methodology for maintaining an amicable environment in tunnels during normal operations while providing an evacuation path during tunnel fire emergencies. The present work investigates the influence of forced ventilation air oxygen concentrations on tunnel fire dynamics. Mixing inert gasses such as nitrogen, argon, or carbon dioxide with ambient air changes the ventilation air oxygen concentration. In order to quantify the influence of the oxygen content on the critical tunnel safety parameters, multiple computational fluid dynamics (CFD) simulations were done on a reduced-size tunnel while preserving the system Froude number. Analytical expressions were developed to describe the importance of oxygen content on the tunnel fire dynamics. By employing Froude scaling, the resulting relations were extrapolated to real scale tunnels. For the ambient air ventilation, the extrapolated expressions displayed good agreement with experimental literature data. By adjusting the oxygen concentration, parameters such as maximum tunnel ceiling temperature, fire growth rate, maximum heat flux to the tunnel floor, maximum flux on the tunnel ceiling, and maximum heat release rate can be controlled. This is the case also for oxygen levels where people can survive. This may increase the possibility for evacuation and improve the conditions for firefighting, significantly improving tunnel fire safety.

Analysis of Walking-speed of Cruise ship Passenger for Effective Evacuation in Emergency

In Korea, people are paying growing attention to leisure activities on ships as they grow wealthy, and as a result, the volume of passenger ships and the number of passengers are on the rise. In case of emergency such as fire, evacuation on a cruise ship is different from other buildings due to unique spatial characteristics(e.g. evacuation route) and other factors(e.g. the ship's movement). For this reason, a special evacuation plan is needed in consideration of passengers’ walking on a ship. Passengers of a cruise ship without an experience of on-board life participated in the experiment for comparative analysis of walking speed along the corridors(horizontal walking) and stairs(vertical walking) that are used as evacuation path in case of a marine emergency. For the experiment, the participants’ movements along the designated horizontal and vertical routes were recorded by several CCTVs, and recorded videos were analysed to calculate walking speed based on the distance between two baselines and the time it took to cross them. For horizontal walking, walking speed dropped by 13.5% when the ship was sailing than when at berth; particularly, in sections that are partly narrowed with obstacles, walking speed fell sharply by 20∼25%. For vertical walking, the ship's movements had less impact on walking speed, and downward walking was faster than upward walking by 20% for both when the ship was at sea and at berth. By age, participants ages 60 and over walked slowest for both horizontal and vertical walking. When the ship was sailing, its movements affected walking speed by age less for horizontal walking than for vertical walking. By gender, speed difference was relatively smaller when the ship was at sea, and men's walking speed was more affected by the ship's movements. Further research is needed on evacuation speed in a simulation of an actual marine emergency such as fire, as well as research on pre-evacuation time in consideration of sleeping facilities within a ship.

МОДЕЛИРОВАНИЕ ПРОЦЕССА ЭВАКУАЦИИ ИЗ ВЫСОТНЫХ ЗДАНИЙ И СООРУЖЕНИЙ С ИСПОЛЬЗОВАНИЕМ ПАССАЖИРСКИХ ЛИФТОВ

Introduction. The number of multi-storey buildings and structures increases every year. Now there is an improving tendency of elderly people who remains be able to work even in old age. The issue of evacuation people with reduced mobility is especially acute. In high-rise buildings, evacuation paths are very long, which makes the evacuation process for these groups not only difficult and dangerous, but also physically impossible. At the same time, most problems with using elevators as the main evacuation path have been almost solved. The article’s purpose is to simulate the evacuation process from a high-rise building with using elevators as one of the main path. Tasks: 1) determine the evacuation time dependence on the movement parameters of people different mobility groups; 2) compare the evacuation time on the staircase and through the elevators. Methods. The Pathfinder PC was used to calculate the people evacuation from a modeled building. The evacuation time was calculated using both ladders exclusively and with partial use of vertical elevator units. The calculations were carried out taking into account the presence of the reduced mobility population group. Results and discussion. The evacuation time was obtained using only the ladder and compared with the theoretical computation. The effect on evacuation time with time parameters (the evacuation start and signal delay), the flow composition (various mobility groups), and the evacuation base level for each group are calculated. The evacuation time is compared on the staircase and through elevators. Optimal percentage dependences of people, who use the first and second versions of evacuation, are obtained. Conclusion. The requirements for fire elevators safety are as high as for non-smoke-free staircases. In 60-storey office buildings (in contrast to the 20-storey), the use of elevators and manage measures for the human flow significantly reduce the evacuation time. For high-rise buildings in the future, it is necessary to consider the organization of evacuation with the use of elevators.

Towards Disaster Resilient Smart Cities: Can Internet of Things and Big Data Analytics Be the Game Changers?

Disasters (natural or man-made) can be lethal to human life, the environment, and infrastructure. The recent advancements in the Internet of Things (IoT) and the evolution in big data analytics (BDA) technologies have provided an open opportunity to develop highly needed disaster resilient smart city environments. In this paper, we propose and discuss the novel reference architecture and philosophy of a disaster resilient smart city (DRSC) through the integration of the IoT and BDA technologies. The proposed architecture offers a generic solution for disaster management activities in smart city incentives. A combination of the Hadoop Ecosystem and Spark are reviewed to develop an efficient DRSC environment that supports both real-time and offline analysis. The implementation model of the environment consists of data harvesting, data aggregation, data pre-processing, and big data analytics and service platform. A variety of datasets (i.e., smart buildings, city pollution, traffic simulator, and twitter) are utilized for the validation and evaluation of the system to detect and generate alerts for a fire in a building, pollution level in the city, emergency evacuation path, and the collection of information about natural disasters (i.e., earthquakes and tsunamis). The evaluation of the system efficiency is measured in terms of processing time and throughput that demonstrates the performance superiority of the proposed architecture. Moreover, the key challenges faced are identified and briefly discussed.

Mobile Fire Evacuation System for Large Public Buildings Based on Artificial Intelligence and IoT

The complexity and variability of the internal environment of public buildings prompt to think about how to protect people in the fire and quickly reach the safe area. With the help of the Internet of Things, firefighting facilities, such as fire hydrants, fire extinguishers, safety evacuation signs, fire sprinklers, fire pumps, smoke, temperature, and fire doors in buildings can be dynamically monitored and controlled. In addition, based on the relevant fire emergency evacuation strategies and ideas at home and abroad, the artificial intelligence technology is used to construct an efficient and intelligent dynamic evacuation path solving model, and an intelligent mobile terminal fire evacuation system was built for large public buildings based on artificial intelligence technology. When a fire breaks out, the system can help guide people to evacuate from the building real-time and reach the safe exit quickly, so as to reduce casualties and economic losses.

Available Flood Evacuation Time for High-Risk Areas in the Middle Reach of Chao Phraya River Basin

Information about risk is essential to design flood risk management programs. To our knowledge, this is the first attempt to develop an emergency flood evacuation plan based on flood risk assessment. Flood risk assessment in the middle Chao Phraya River Basin (CPRB) was simultaneously analyzed and mapped as the product of flood hazard, and social vulnerability maps generated by fuzzy Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) and fuzzy logic. One of the purposes of flood risk mapping is to promote proper and prompt evacuation actions for residents. The emergency flood evacuation model was tested to explore the available time of evacuation, to reduce the risk or even the loss of life. The simulation results showed that significant time was available for evacuation in the middle CPRB. This was calculated based on a physical status of evacuees, safe evacuation condition, shortest evacuation path, flood shelter, and road capacity.

Evacuation Planning for Disaster Management by Using The Relaxation Based Algorithm and Route Choice Model

Research in the field of disaster management is done by utilizing information and communication technology. Where disaster management is discussed is about evacuation planning issues. The evacuation stage is a very crucial stage in the disaster evacuation process. There have been many methods and algorithms submitted for the evacuation planning process, but no one has directly addressed evacuation planning on dynamic issues concerning time-varying and volume-dependent. This research will use the Relaxation-Based Algorithm combined with the Route Choice Model to produce evacuation models that can be applied to dynamic issues related to time-varying and volume-dependent because some types of disaster will result in damage as time and evacuation paths are volume-dependent so as to adjust to the change in the number of people evacuated. Disaster data that will be used in this research is sourced from Disaster Information Management System sourced from DesInventar. The results of this study are expected to produce an evacuation planning model that can be applied to dynamic problems that take into account the time-varying and volume-dependent aspects.

Prototipe Pengendali Pintu Daurat Menggunakan Mikrokontroler ATMega 16

In a building should have a good security system,especially Emergency Exit (emergency evacuation path).Emergency Exit is important because when an emergency occursin the building, the first thing to do is get out of the lab building.One thing to note is the emergency exit door. With the emergencydoor that can be opened quickly so all workers can get outquickly as well from the building when an emergency occurs.So,we need a model (prototype) controlling an emergency door thatcan function properly in an emergency. Prototype newemergency door controller is expected to be implemented intoactual emergency door. Prototype can be accessed with a pushbutton by the user facility. The prototype controller usemicrocontroller ATMega16. And for each emergency exitmovement is monitored and its status is expressed in LEDindicator lights and LCD display on 16x2. Modeling controllingemergency exit of a series of tests using a prototype have workedwell except on the 3rd test caused an error when calibrating thedistance between Ultrasonic sensor with Emergency Door.

Contingency planning for fire protection in built environment: Risk analysis in campus area

Urban and Regional Planning Department, Institut Teknologi Sepuluh Nopember has experienced small fire incident in Computer Laboratory, in the middle of 2015. This incident is caused by short circuiting and electricity used in high activities. In addition, the buildings have not yet equipped with evacuation paths strategies nor fire protection system. This article aims to describe the contingency plan formulation process of fire incident in campus building concerning the hazard, vulnerability, and risk level of fire. The method used is based on disaster risk management process, included identify the hazard, measure the vulnerability, analyse the risk level of fire, then analyse the assembly point and evacuation routes to formulate the contingency plan. The finding shows that the fire risk level is categorised into high, medium, and low fire risk. Then, based on scoring analysis, we found the best route to assembly point in the Northwest side of the building. The results are then combined with the stakeholders perception consists of Department’s managers, employees, head of the laboratory and students to formulate contingency plans as an improvement over a fire preparedness. Contingency plan consists of scenarios, policies and strategies according to the fire prevention sectors.

Big data oriented intelligent traffic evacuation path fuzzy control system

Big data oriented intelligent traffic evacuation path fuzzy control system

Study on emergency ventilation for train fire environment in metro interchange tunnel

Metro interchange tunnels have been extensively constructed to meet the requirements of traffic organizations among travel lines. Fire safety issues remain a concern owing to the peculiar building structure and lack of special guidelines from current design standards and norms for ventilation. Focusing on this problem, and aiming to establish a safe evacuation environment, we carried out numerical simulations and full-scale experiment to investigate the efficiency of available co-work ventilation modes in eliminating smoke induced by train fire. The numerical model was constructed by Fire Dynamic Simulator 6.3.2, using the parameters of a real tunnel, ventilation systems containing tunnel ventilation fan (TVF), jet fan, ceiling duct, and the available co-work modes among these. The grid size and boundary conditions were verified through full-scale fire experiment and theoretical prediction by comparing the fire plume and ceiling jet flow temperature. The results demonstrate that, the semi-hybrid ventilation mode provides safe evacuation environment to the greatest extent, by utilizing the co-operation of TVFs, jet flow, and downstream ceiling extraction, compared to other modes. This mode effectively eliminated smoke and maintained the temperature, harmful gases, visibility and radiant heat flux at a safe level upstream of the fire. Furthermore, the optimized operation of the ceiling duct improved the smoke discharge efficiency as far as possible downstream of the middle carriage fire. An emergency response plan was eventually proposed for different fire scenarios, including equipment activation and passenger evacuation strategies, providing guidance for rapidly creating safe evacuation path in the interchange tunnel fire environment.

Road network risk analysis considering people flow under ordinary and evacuation situations

Both pre-disaster approaches, e.g., mitigation and preparedness, and post-disaster approaches, e.g., response and recovery, play important roles to mitigate the damage from large-scale disasters. From the viewpoint of disaster response, there have been studies on evacuation guiding schemes and applications using evacuees’ mobile devices, e.g., smart phones. On the other hand, disaster preparedness has also been studied mainly on geographical information analysis, e.g., road blockage probability and people flow data. The road blockage probability is the probability that the corresponding road is blocked due to collapse of roadside buildings when an earthquake occurs. The people flow data express the people flow in usual time. In this paper, with the help of evacuation guiding schemes, road blockage probability, and people flow data, we propose a road network risk analysis approach that considers people flow in both ordinary and evacuation situations, which can be used to as a tool to strengthen the urban fabric for fostering better evacuees’ responses in disaster situations. First, the proposed approach derives ordinary road demand, which is the degree of road usage at a certain interval in an ordinary situation, from the people flow data. Then, it calculates evacuation road demand, i.e., the degree of road usage at a certain interval in an evacuation situation, by extending the edge betweenness centrality under the assumption that people located according to the ordinary road demand move to refuges along their evacuation paths. Finally, it detects roads with high risk of encountering blocked road segments by combining the road blockage probability and evacuation road demand. Through numerical experiments under a case study of Arako area of Nagoya city in Japan, we show the proposed approach can detect such high-risk roads. Furthermore, we show the detected roads spatially change according to the people flow in ordinary situations, evacuation behavior, and disaster occurrence time.

An Evacuation Route Model of Crowd Based on Emotion and Geodesic

Making unconventional emergent plan for dense crowd is one of the critical issues of evacuation simulations. In order to make the behavior of crowd more believable, we present a real-time evacuation route approach based on emotion and geodesic under the influence of individual emotion and multi-hazard circumstances. The proposed emotion model can reflect the dynamic process of individual in group on three factors: individual emotion, perilous field, and crowd emotion. Specifically, we first convert the evacuation scene to Delaunay triangulation representations. Then, we use the optimization-driven geodesic approach to calculate the best evacuation path with user-specified geometric constraints, such as crowd density, obstacle information, and perilous field. Finally, the Smooth Particle Hydrodynamics method is used for local avoidance of collisions with nearby agents in real-time simulation. Extensive experimental results show that our algorithm is efficient and well suited for real-time simulations of crowd evacuation.

Development of a technique for establishing a pseudo tunnel length

In the case of a tunnel fire, it is likely that the evacuation path of some of the tunnel users will be obstructed by the cloud of smoke that falls to the road surface of the tunnel. It is important to be able to predict the falling point of the ceiling jet smoke resulting from the fire for improving evacuation strategy. However, a considerably long tunnel is required for examining the distance traveled by the smoke generated in full and model scales fire experiments. It is often difficult to satisfy this requirement while performing fire experiments at laboratory scale. The objective of this study was to develop a new technique for examining the smoke falling phenomenon by using a model scale tunnel with insufficient length. In the new technique, a cooling apparatus was introduced to simulate heat transfer from smoke to tunnel walls. If the amount of convective heat absorbed by the cooling apparatus with length Lc is equivalent to the amount of convective heat lost by the heat transfer to the tunnel walls while the smoke flowed through the distance Ls under a tunnel ceiling, the cooling apparatus with length Lc can be equivalent of a tunnel length Ls. We denote the tunnel length simulated by the cooling apparatus by a pseudo tunnel length. A series of fire experiments were conducted using a 1:10 scale model tunnel with a length of 12 m. In this study, we assessed the effectiveness of the technique for simulating a pseudo tunnel. Experimental results showed that a tunnel with a length of 18.6 m can be simulated by a 12 m tunnel using the new technique proposed.

Re-design of Tegalega Park in Bandung for flood evacuation park

The Southern part of Bandung city Indonesia is often flooded in rainy season. The frequent flooding in this area is the main reason for Bandung municipality to initiate mitigation plan. The selected place for mitigation due to evacuation space provision was Tegalega Park. The mitigation plan was contained in Bandung City Planning 2011-2031. The Tegalega Park was considered as an evacuation park, which has been considered as one of several mitigation efforts in providing evacuation space. Evacuation parkhas functions as a city park on a typical day and a muster point in the event of a disaster. This study aims to design an evacuation park that meets both functions. Methods applied were spatial, descriptive and quantitative analysis. Spatial analysis was used to determine the appropriate area for the evacuation park (not located in flood prone area, far from hazardous area, and near with hospitals). Descriptive analysis was used to analyze social and cultural aspects and history of flood disaster in Bandung. Furthermore, quantitative analysis was used to calculate evacuation path distance (Mohammad Toha Street 6.35km and Cibaduyut Raya Street 6.74 km), optimum thermal temperature (without modification), and carrying capacity. The results of the analysis show that Tegalega Park can be used as evacuation site. The design of Tegalega Park took Bandung Lautan Api stilation as a design concept which were described in site plan and 3D perspective.

Evacuation paths in historic city centres: A holistic methodology for assessing their seismic risk

During seismic emergencies in historical urban scenarios, evacuation paths can suffer significant damages and modifications due to both extrinsic (i.e.: building facing the path) and intrinsic (i.e.: pavements state, the presence of underground lifelines or hypogeum) vulnerabilities. Such damages and modifications can hinder the population's evacuation and the first responders’ intervention, mainly because of paths' blockage or unavailability in emergency conditions. Paths’ safety is additionally affected by populations’ exposure conditions, also due to individuals’ motion in the post-earthquake environment. Hence, an analysis of factors influencing the seismic risk of evacuation paths and a consequent evaluation of their safety during the emergency are thus desirable. This work aims to offer a preliminary and quick holistic method for seismic risk assessment and damage level estimation of possible evacuation paths. Firstly, data about safety influencing factors (i.e.: path use and exposure; geometric features; physical-structural features; extrinsic vulnerability; seismic hazard) are collected, associated to related weights and organized in risk indexes according to three calculation approaches. Then, according to real-world data, a correlation about path risk-damage levels is proposed with the additional purpose to evaluate the method capabilities in describing post-earthquake scenarios. Obtained results evidence that the proposed methodology could help safety designers in the seismic emergency planning of urban paths (i.e.: by means of risk maps) by including the management of population's evacuation routes towards assembly points, the optimization of rescuers’ activities and the promotion of different priorities of interventions on building heritage.

방재주택 계획을 위한 공간계획 컨셉 및 수법의 고찰 : 일본 민간주택회사의 주택상품을 중심으로

Purpose: Hazard-Resistant Houses which are installed integrated systems against the natural disaster are focusing on the cutting edge equipments requiring power supply and now researches on the Spatial Design of Hazard-Resistant Houses are needed. Method: To conduct research, categorizing and analyzing process for ‘Spatial Design Concepts’ and its subordinate items and methods found in the Hazard-Resistant House in Japan was carried out. Result: In this study, a couple of spatial concepts and sub-items are suggested for hazard-resistant houses. First, the concept of variety ‘Design of Space’ which consist of subordinate items such as ‘Vertical Space’, ‘Multi-Direction Evacuation’ and ‘Preparedness for Submersion’ is needed for hazard-resistant house’s spatial design. Second, the concept of variety ‘Use of Space’ which has subordinate items of ‘Underground Space’, ‘Evacuation Shelter’ and ‘Microclimate’ is needed. Third, the concept of ‘Stock & Store’ which has ‘System’ and ‘Design’, and Lastly, the concept of ‘Psychology & Safety’ which has ‘Evacuation Path’, ‘Communication’ and ‘Security Area’ as its subordinate items is needed.

Disaster Impact Mitigation using KDD and Support Vector Machine algorithms

Disasters such as Hurricanes, Typhoons, Floods and earthquakesare not good for the society since it causes serious damage for the society. A natural disaster causes loss in property as well as in life of victims. The victims need immediate help once they are affected by the disaster. The immediate need are rescue, food and communications. The survey says victims of recent disaster were unable to get instant communication regarding the evacuation path and other help from authorities for remedial action. This can be overcome with our proposed idea of having a database of area wise population along with the pre-disaster and post-disaster satellite images of the disaster affected area. Knowledge Discovery in Databases (KDD) is used in data pre-processing and to extract knowledge from the database. Support vector machine(SVM) is used to classify the disaster effect with the pre-disaster and post-disaster satellite images as input. The idea is implemented and tested with sample data and has given impressive results

Earthquake building debris estimation in historic city centres: From real world data to experimental-based criteria

Safety and availability of urban paths in case of earthquake depend on buildings vulnerability and related produced debris on streets, especially in historic city centres. Predicting probable critical debris amounts on evacuation paths (i.e.: up to path blockage) can help safety planners to propose focused interventions on buildings, to design more effective emergency plans and to improve the effectiveness of rescuers’ actions while supporting evacuees during first emergency phases. This way, this work proposes new experimentally-based correlations aimed at estimating the amount of external debris for historic masonry buildings (in terms of percentage of facing street area occupied by debris and related debris depth) depending on the vulnerability of these buildings, on the seismic magnitude, and (for the first time) on the combination of these two factors and the path geometric ratio (i.e.: building height versus facing street width), so as to consider the effect of different urban contexts. Different vulnerability assessment methods are also considered to generalise the proposed methodology. Finally, starting from obtained experimental correlations, the method is tested on one case study to demonstrate its capabilities in post-earthquake scenario prevision. The method could be a fundamental tool for the assessment of possible paths blockages and “average” available space for evacuees’ emergency motion along paths. Localizing these emergency interferences on an urban map will allow planners to propose specific risk-reduction strategies in the urban scenario.