Evacuation Simulation Research Articles

3D INDOOR-PEDESTRIAN INTERACTION IN EMERGENCIES: A REVIEW OF ACTUAL EVACUATIONS AND SIMULATION MODELS

Abstract. Pedestrian motions and behaviours in evacuations are compactly interrelated indoor environments. According to how pedestrians interact with indoor environments in three-dimensional (3D) space, 3D indoor-pedestrian interaction is defined as five sorts of specific pedestrian motions, i.e., stepping over, crawling, bent-over walking, jumping over and climbing over. However, the occurrence and prevalence of the interaction in actual evacuations have not been identified, and the degree of effectiveness and practicality of the evacuation simulation models regarding the interaction is yet to be evaluated. Understanding the interaction and simulating it realistically bring apparent benefits to support informed policymaking, building safety optimization and emergency relief efforts. Therefore, this article aims to review the 3D indoor-pedestrian interaction in actual evacuations, assess the capabilities and performance of the evacuation simulation models for the interaction, and identify their limitations and challenges for future work. We first demonstrate that the fundamental relationships between the decision-making process of a pedestrian, object distance and object size/shape in 3D space are unclear yet, and the scarcity of experimental investigation for local routes choices and each motion is vast. Subsequently, the comparisons between Social Force models, Cellular Automata models and Agent-based models suggest that these microscopic models can yield the 3D indoor-pedestrian interaction, but the height dimension of 3D space is not explicitly considered during the evacuation modelling. This article is expected to advance the understanding of pedestrian evacuations in 3D space, ultimately improving pedestrian safety in indoor environments.

A proposal for mutual-aid-type distributed evacuation based on residents’ evacuation intentions in a hilly and mountainous area of Japan

Flooding and landslide disasters caused by typhoons and heavy rains occur annually in many parts of the world. It is advisable to evacuate to safe places in advance when there is an imminent risk of a disaster. Delayed evacuation is a challenging problem that has been addressed in several studies. This study proposes a mutual-aid-type distributed evacuation policy that effectively utilizes limited community resources available for support in hilly and mountainous areas. Since hilly and mountainous areas often have well-formed communities, they have the potential to develop evacuation plans tailored to the region's actual conditions and its residents, with a focus on mutual aid, while accommodating limited resources. First, semi-structured interviews were conducted using open-ended questions with almost all residents in the study area, which is a hilly and mountainous area in Japan. Based on the results of these surveys, this study clarified the evacuation intentions of residents and identified the community resources. Furthermore, this study proposes a mutual-aid-type distributed evacuation as a suitable evacuation policy for the study area, and verifies its feasibility through a simplified evacuation simulation. In addition, this study discusses the potential for its application in other hilly and mountainous areas in Japan. In the future, as society matures and the population concentrates in urban areas, the number of aging communities is expected to increase. The mutual-aid-type distributed evacuation proposed in this study will contribute to an evacuation policy suitable for such societies.

Determining Subway Emergency Evacuation Efficiency Using Hybrid System Dynamics and Multiple Agents

With the rapid development of the city, more and more people are choosing the subway as their travel mode. However, the hidden dangers of the subway are becoming increasingly prominent, and emergency evacuation of the subway has become a key factor for its safe operation. Therefore, the research objectives of this paper were to focus on the subway emergency evacuation hybrid model to fill the gap in the field of emergency evacuation simulation methods and countermeasure optimization. The analysis network process (ANP) was used to analyze the influence factors and weights of subway pedestrian evacuation. On this basis, a multiagent model of subway pedestrian evacuation (SD + multiagent) was developed and simulated. The results show that the comprehensive evacuation strategy could improve the evacuation efficiency, shorten the evacuation time, and avoid the waste of resources. This study not only improved the accuracy of the simulation, but also clarified the evacuation process. This approach can effectively prevent the occurrence of subway accidents, reduce casualties, and prevent large-scale casualties such as secondary accidents (induced secondary disasters).

A highway vehicle routing dataset during the 2019 Kincade Fire evacuation

As the threat of wildfire increases, it is imperative to enhance the understanding of household evacuation behavior and movements. Mobile GPS data provide a unique opportunity for studying evacuation routing behavior with high ecological validity, but there are little publicly available data. We generated a highway vehicle routing dataset derived from GPS trajectories generated by mobile devices (e.g., smartphones) in Sonoma County, California during the 2019 Kincade Fire that started on October 23, 2019. This dataset contains 21,160 highway vehicle routing records within Sonoma County from October 16, 2019 to November 13, 2019. The quality of the dataset is validated by checking trajectories and average travel speeds. The potential use of this dataset lies in analyzing and modeling evacuee route choice behavior, estimating traffic conditions during the evacuation, and validating wildfire evacuation simulation models.

Pedestrian evacuation simulation in multi-exit case: An emotion and group dual-driven method

This paper analyzes the characteristics of emotion state and group behavior in the evacuation process. During the emergency evacuation, emotion state and group behavior are interacting with each other, and indivisible. The emotion spread model with the effect of group behavior, and the leader–follower model with the effect of emotion state are proposed. On this basis, exit choice strategies with the effect of emotion state and group behavior are proposed. Fusing emotion spread model, leader–follower model, and exit choice strategies into a cellular automata (CA)-based pedestrian simulation model, we simulate the evacuation process in a multi-exit case. Simulation results indicate that panic emotion and group behavior are two negative influence factors for pedestrian evacuation. Compared with panic emotion or group behavior only, pedestrian evacuation efficiency with the effects of both is lower.

Fire Safety in Museums: Simulation of Fire Scenarios for Development of Control Evacuation Schemes from the Winter Palace of the Hermitage

The manuscript is focused on the problems of evacuation in case of fire from the buildings of museums as places with a mass presence of people. Features specific to museums and how they affect safe evacuation conditions are discussed. Most attention is paid to evacuation management, since the vast majority of museum visitors are not familiar with the layout of the building. In this case, the actions of staff in evacuation management are decisive. The paper considers the development of evacuation schemes, taking into account the spread of fire hazards in the building and the development of instructions on their basis for the staff. Using the example of the Winter Palace of the State Hermitage Museum, the solution of the marked tasks with the use of computer simulation of evacuation during a fire is given. The analysis of the simulation results showed the vulnerabilities of the museum. In this work, the evacuation schemes for the scenarios are considered. The maximum number of visitors at a single time in the Winter Palace has been set at 4000. The principles of making evacuation schemes are formulated, including taking into account the peculiarities of space-planning solutions inherent in museums, such as enfilades and the connections of rooms.

Spatial Allocation Method of Evacuation Guiders in Urban Open Public Spaces: A Case Study of Binjiang Green Space in Xuhui District, Shanghai, China.

Evacuation guiders play an important role when emergency events occur in urban open public spaces. Considering the shortcomings of the existing studies, an optimization method based on the Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO) algorithm and gradual covering model for spatial allocation of evacuation guiders in urban open public spaces is proposed. This method considers the impact of obstacles on intervisibility between guiders and evacuees, and the non-linear changing characteristics of the evacuation guiding quality based on the distances between guiders and evacuees to optimize the space allocation of evacuation guiders in urban open public spaces. Based on the emergency evacuation simulation, the evacuation efficiencies before and after the optimization of evacuation guider allocation can be compared to verify the validity of the proposed method. Furthermore, in order to improve the applicability of this method, the responsibility areas of the evacuation guiders are zoned according to different time periods. A case study of Binjiang Green Space in Xuhui District, Shanghai, China was conducted to demonstrate the feasibility of the proposed method. The results showed that the spatial allocation of evacuation guiders was highly correlated with the dynamic spatial change of evacuees. The reasonable spatial allocation optimization of evacuation guiders can effectively improve the emergency evacuation quality and reduce evacuation risks. The zoning of the evacuation guiders’ responsibility areas can help to clarify the responsibility area of each guider and provide a daily safety precaution scheme under a limited number of guiders. The method can provide detailed decision support for the security precaution of security staff and emergency evacuation management in urban open public spaces.

Efficient simulation of natural hazard evacuation for seacoast cities

Evacuation plans in seacoast areas are essential for conducting people to secure zones in a timely manner. Typically, evacuation plans are based on the experience of previous evacuation drills, which are expensive processes that require coordination, planning and the collaboration of different institutions and people. During evacuation drills it is difficult to obtain all the data required to analyze the situation and additionally, it is difficult to detect all possible threatening situations. Computer simulations can be used to run evacuation models for evaluating different evacuation scenarios. However, developing realistic simulations is a complex task. Moreover, large simulation models considering many thousands of people demand a high computational cost and thereby, the simulation of different evacuation plans can become a highly time-consuming task. In this work, we present an approach to model and simulate the behavior of people in mass evacuations of seacoast areas. Our proposal aims to improve the computational efficiency of the calculations performed without compromising the quality of results by means of parallel computing. The simulation model divides the geographic area in cells of fixed sizes. Then, to reduce the amount of calculations performed in each simulation timestep, for each simulated agent we compute a mobility model by considering only the agents placed in the closest neighboring cells. The proposed simulation model achieves realistic results by combining geographic data, public census data, the density of the population, the surrounding view of each person and disaggregation by age groups. This reduces the error in decision making and allows a proper estimation of the distance of groups of people that cannot arrive at safe areas. The respective simulator has been implemented using agent-based programming in C++ and OpenMP. The simulation model was evaluated by performing experimentation on actual data collected from the Chilean cities of Iquique and Viña del Mar, and the city of Kesennuma in Japan.

An emergency aircraft evacuation simulation considering passenger overtaking and luggage retrieval

The irrational behaviors of passengers due to panic and anxiety during actual evacuations are challenging to be fully controlled by the crew. These behaviors may lead to the inefficiency of actual evacuation. This research builds a cabin evacuation model considering passengers’ luggage retrieval and overtaking behaviors based on cellular automata to improve the safety of aviation passengers.. The model introduces disaster levels to describe passengers’ anxiety and implements the “faster-is-slower” effect. Two possible overtaking routes are proposed, and we explored the effect of overtaking and retrieving luggage. The result shows that both overtaking and luggage retrieval negatively impact evacuation efficiency, and the impact of baggage retrieving is greater than overtaking. However, overtaking can essentially eliminate the influence of baggage retrieving. The effect of prohibiting irrational behaviors in different cabin compartments is analyzed to simulate crews’ guidance. The results show that the crew's enhanced guidance of the second part is the most effective.

Optimization on Spatial Distribution of Shelter through Dynamic Evacuation Simulation of High Density Urban Area-Xinjiekou Case

The optimal location of emergency shelters is essential for boosting the evacuation efficiency and resilience of cities. For determining evacuation demands and residents' evacuation allocations, a two-stage model for the optimization of shelter site that utilizes high-precision day and night population data derived from mobile signalling has been developed. In the initial phase, static network analysis served as the foundation for identifying the site arrangements with the smallest number of additional shelters via the enhanced set-covering model. The second-stage optimization determines the best location scheme with the minimum evacuation time using a modified social force model, along with the population's spatial heterogeneity, age structure, and evacuation route selection. Xinjiekou was chosen to assess evacuation efficiency. The utilization rates of shelters and the amount of congestion on the roads before and after optimization are assessed. The outcome demonstrated a 76.5% reduction in evacuation time, a vast improvement in the usage efficiency of shelters, and a significant reduction in congestion along the evacuation route. This method of location optimization marks a break from the usual empirical top-down research paradigm in favor of a bottom-up numerical simulation of the real evacuation process, which satisfies all local residents' and government's needs.

Pedestrian emergency evacuation model based on risk field under attack event

In recent years, stabbings have occurred frequently around the world, often causing serious casualties and property losses. Therefore, using evacuation model to simulate and analyze this type of attack mode is of great significance to personnel safety and social stability. However, in the simulation process, the lack of interaction rules between pedestrians and attackers will seriously reduce the accuracy and credibility of the simulation result. Herein, this article focuses on the pedestrian evacuation under stabbings, we proposed a risk field model for pedestrian movement, its formula referred to the continuous point-source diffusion equation in unbounded space. The influence of the surrounding environment on pedestrian movement was considered comprehensively to set the direction of the force exerted by the attacker, pedestrian movement rules and exit selection mechanism were introduced in details. At the same time, we discuss two different attack strategies for attackers, and carried out virtual reality experiments to analyze the experimenter’s attack modes and compare them with the two pure strategies. Multiple simulations are conducted on the basis of the model to explore the physical significance of model parameters and the influence of attack mode and location on evacuation, and to explore the mechanism of pedestrians’ selection of exits under the condition of multiple exits. At the end of this paper, the simulation results are summarized and suggestions for evacuation under emergencies are provided, which may be helpful to the simulation of pedestrian evacuation under emergencies in the future.

Flood disaster evacuation route choice in Indonesian urban riverbank kampong: Exploring the role of individual characteristics, path risk elements, and path network configuration

Emergency evacuation is regarded as the most important disaster response action for protecting human life from potentially lethal threats. Despite growing research aimed at evaluating and modelling evacuation for strategic flood disaster preparedness, remarkably little is known about how informal settlement dwellers realized and negotiated surrounding environment for evacuation path route choice. The purpose of this paper is to analyze the dynamic interaction between human characteristics, path risk elements, and path network configuration in constructing flood evacuation route choices based on two cases study of urban riverbank kampongs in Yogyakarta, Indonesia. To understand these interactions, we applied a mixed method based on a qualitative research approach, which included (1) walking evacuation simulation with video analysis to understand the informality practices and kampong's space setting, (2) an analysis of dweller's narrative experience collected from walking interviews, (3) computational path network configuration analysis using space syntax. Our findings suggest that kampong dwellers selected evacuation routes differently based on their individual capacity, the safety performance of path design, and path network characteristics in accommodating the safest travel. When juxtaposing space syntax results with walking evacuation simulation, the individual evacuation route choice is highly related to space syntax measures (normalized angular choice at local radii), implying that the majority of residents still prefer to walk on the straightest route (the route with the least angular deviation) to reach the assembly/exit points. Furthermore, this research demonstrates that not all residents have the same capabilities to walk on the straightest evacuation route due to physical capacity and limitation that relates to gender and ages differences in negotiating path risk elements. The use of mixed method approaches provided a practical insight into emphasizing the human-centered perspective in planning an effective flood emergency evacuation for informal riverbank settlements through spatial design, planning, that respect vulnerable groups.

Analysis of the Evacuation Time based on the Desk Spacing Used by Internet Computer Gaming Facility Providers

This study aims to measure changes in the evacuation time with respect to the desk spacing used by internet computer gaming facility providers using an evacuation simulation program and to analyze the results. Currently, the “Special Act on the Safety Management of Multi-Use Businesses” only regulates the width of the internal evacuation passage. There is no regulation on the width of the evacuation space as determined by the arrangement of furniture in internet computer gaming facilities. Considering this, the evacuation times for evacuation passage widths of 190, 210, 230, and 260 cm were compared and analyzed considering various variables of the facility space. The results show that there is a large difference in the evacuation time, ranging from 166.0 s to 154.0 s, as the passage width increases from the minimum to the maximum. With the increasing popularity of internet gaming facilities and considering the safety of the evacuees, it is necessary to draft regulations on the width of new evacuation spaces during the deployment of internet computer gaming facilities.

A modified cellular automaton model of pedestrian evacuation in a tunnel fire

This paper presents evacuation simulations of occupants’ flow in a tunnel fire via a modified cellular automaton model and puts forward corresponding optimized evacuation strategies. A 2-D grid field represents the simulated tunnel and a 20 MW fire is placed in the middle of the tunnel. Fire, as the key factor is regarded both as a dynamic obstacle along with its development and a repelling force on each occupant. During occupants’ movement, game theory is taken into consideration when people intend to move to the same target simultaneously and they could either corporate or fight for the target. Seven exits layouts and the moving conflict preference of pedestrians during movement are investigated with three levels of crowd densities namely low, medium and high in conditions either with fire or without fire. The results show frequent conflict among occupants and single, overlaid exits will result in a longer evacuation and a declined evacuation efficiency. The decline is very sensitive to crowds’ density and the high crowd density performs a much worse evacuation efficiency. In addition, the fire aggravates the decline to a large extent in all conditions and it would lead to a larger possibility of injury for occupants during evacuation in a tunnel fire. Therefore, it is necessary to predict evacuation flow prudently with models considering fire rather than those without fire, which may result in an unrealistic optimistic result.

An integrated method for assessing passenger evacuation performance in ship fires

In order to assess effectively the passenger evacuation performance in ship fires, a quantitative method combining the computational fluid dynamics (CFD)-derived fire data and AnyLogic evacuation simulation is proposed in this paper. In this developed method, the speed reduction factor, instantaneous untenable conditions and fractional effective dose (FED) model are utilized to consider the effects of smoke visibility, heat and toxic gases in ship fires on the passenger walking speed, activity space and human health conditions. In order to demonstrate this proposed method, passenger evacuation analysis is performed in a hypothetical zone of the ship with obstacles for fast t-squared fires. The results indicate that the relationship between the required safe egress time (RSET) and fire heat release rate (HRR) is non-monotonic. However, the total FED increases with the increase of the fire HRR and the sequence of survivors. Compared with two existing methods, this proposed method is able to assess more rigorously the passenger evacuation performance in ship fires. The existing ASET/RSET method is more conservative, and the existing FED method with the Pathfinder underestimates the FED in ship fires. This work will provide a more accurate method for ship fire safety assessment and performance-based fire protection design.

Dynamic leader role modeling for self‐organizing crowd evacuation simulation

AbstractThe role of the leader in the self‐organizing crowd has a significant influence on the crowd evacuation when an emergency occurs. However, current crowd evacuation models either ignore the leadership characteristics of pedestrians or predefine an invariable leader identity. This article clearly distinguishes leaders from followers in a crowd and evaluates the impact of the leader's role on crowd evacuation under dynamic situations. First, the leadership model of the pedestrian is built based on the classic OCEAN personality parameters. Social dominance tendency is measured for more credibility. Then, the dynamic leader role model (DLRM) is proposed to describe the relationship between leaders and followers, considering the interaction among pedestrians during the evacuation. Finally, a novel crowd simulation algorithm based on the above DLRM is presented using the extended social force model. Various experiments in several typical scenarios verified that our proposed simulation model has better realism.

Extraction and modelling application of evacuation movement characteristic parameters in real earthquake evacuation video based on deep learning

The integration of computer vision, machine learning algorithm and crowd evacuation simulation technology has become a new focus of research. At present, many studies in this aspect only extract related data in a specific scene to train the neural network. Since there is no data and corresponding input of multiple scenes, the trained model can only be applied to a single scene. In addition, using the data obtained from the normal human movement to train the neural network cannot accurately reflect the real emergency evacuation movement characteristics. In order to solve the above problems, firstly, a real earthquake evacuation video set containing multiple scenes were collected and sorted out in this paper. Secondly, this paper proposes a coordinate transformation method suitable for non-calibrated video images. This method, together with the multiple object tracking algorithm combined of YOLOv4 and Deep-SORT, and 17 parameters representing evacuation movement characteristics defined in this study, constitutes a method to automatically extract the evacuation movement characteristic parameters in batches from non-calibrated earthquake evacuation videos. Finally, an evacuation velocity vector classification prediction model based on deep convolutional neural network (CNN-VCPM) is established, which studies the influence of environment factors in evacuation scenes on velocity decision-making at microscopic moment. Compared with back propagation neural network, CNN-VCPM prediction model can more accurately fit the movement behavior of the crowd.

A Ship Fire Escape Speed Correction Method Considering the Influence of Crowd Interaction

The aim of this study is to explore the effect of different personnel attributes and the relationship between different people on evacuation efficiency in the case of a passenger ship fire. As such, this study proposes a speed correction method that considers human attributes and interactions between different populations. Firstly, a hesitant fuzzy set and hesitant fuzzy average operator are adopted to quantify four kinds of personnel attributes. Secondly, considering the influence of different people, this study extracts the formula for acceleration under the interactive influence of different groups of people. At the same time, based on the first-order linear relationship between velocity and acceleration, an interactive velocity correction method is presented in the evacuation of ship personnel. Finally, this study uses the personnel evacuation simulation software Pathfinder to conduct experiments, and introduces the corrected speed and the uncorrected speed into the evacuation simulation process, respectively. The results show that the simulation results of the revised speed plan are more consistent with reality.

An Evacuation Simulation in Multiple Neonatal Intensive Care Units Across a Single City: Lessons Learned.

Evacuations of neonatal intensive care units (NICUs) in emergency situations pose specialized challenges given their population of critically-ill neonates. Most of the literature on this topic describes planned evacuations and simulations due to natural disasters, usually involving only NICU staff. This study examines a unique emergent NICU evacuation simulation involving multiple responders occurring on a citywide scale. A simulated evacuation in response to a fire was conducted in 6 different NICUs in El Paso, Texas. The exercise utilized response from NICU staff and first responders. A standardized tool, by independent evaluators, was used to evaluate staff competencies while reactions were assessed using post-exercise surveys. This city-wide multidisciplinary simulation improved NICU personnel skills in evacuation and also introduced first responders to this specialized patient population. Areas of strength across all NICUs included teamwork, knowledge of evacuation equipment, and patient tracking. Areas for improvement included lack of adequate equipment for post-evacuation care, understanding implications of smoke exposure, alternative evacuation routes, incident command structure, and unified communication. This successful, citywide NICU evacuation simulation improved knowledge among participants, introduced first responders to a specialized patient population, and provided valuable lessons on neonate-specific themes that can be incorporated to improve citywide emergency preparedness.

Status quo and challenges and future development of fire emergency evacuation research and application in built environment

Fire emergency evacuation study has been conducted for decades. In recent two decades, the fire emergency evacuation studies have been incorporating new technologies due to the high demands on efficient and safe evacuation for occupants who have various needs. The proposed fire emergency evacuation system from academic research and solutions from industry practices adopt different technologies to serve various evacuees. Therefore, this study conducts literature review to understand the status quo of current fire emergency evacuation research and practice. It shows that fire emergency evacuation studies mainly focus on the facility operation stage instead of design and construction stages. The facilities include residential buildings, education buildings, subways, shopping centers, etc. Three critical factors affect efficient and safe fire emergency evacuation in a built environment – facility physical features, fire characteristics, and human behavior. This study categories these new technologies, which are incorporated into the fire emergency evacuation research and practices within the recent two decades, into four groups: (1) Facility geometrical analysis, which includes the technologies such as BIM, GIS, VR and the combination of BIM/GIS/VR (2) Fire and smoke simulation, e.g. FDS and Pyrosim. The simulation output such as fire and smoke dynamics is incorporated into intelligent fire evacuation system (3) Crowd evacuation simulation software, e.g. Pathfinder, Massmotion; the output of simulation is used to develop personalized evacuation system (4) Indoor positioning system and mobile device/IoT technology to track and evacuate occupants intelligently. This study presents these new technologies used in the fire emergency evacuation systems and indicates that the development of an intelligent and personalized emergency evacuation system, which may track the evacuees in real time, is the future research trend.