Orderly Evacuation Research Articles

Evacuation strategies for wrecked pedestrians considering emotional contagion and safety officers

Evacuation in shipwrecks remains challenging, and there is a gap in research related to the consideration of emotional changes in pedestrians and the role of safety personnel on passenger ships. The present strategy may be the first work in the dual-model (SIS model and social force model) related research to synthesize the pedestrian's multi-emotional changes and the safety officer's role and movement rules in the shipwreck scenario. We employed a multifactorial two-model approach to enhance the realism of evacuation outcomes during re-sinking scenarios, including pedestrian mood, safety officer, and ship tilt. Our findings reveal critical thresholds for emotion transmission, except for exit width and pedestrian density, where a few people transmitting emotions have minimal effects. Negative emotions beyond a certain threshold can disrupt evacuation and lead to casualties, while positive emotions contribute to smoother evacuations with fewer casualties. Furthermore, optimizing the safety officer's position and action strategy can alleviate the negative feelings of pedestrians and facilitate an orderly evacuation, positively affecting the evacuation outcome, especially in the case of a sinking ship with an increasingly severe angle of inclination. This study provides a valuable framework for improving evacuation safety and minimizing casualties during maritime emergencies.

Fire-Spread Characteristics and Evacuation Plan Optimization of Old Style Multi-Story Student Apartments

Fire is a major disaster event that can have a significant effect on public safety and social development. In a college or university, fire can seriously threaten the safety, lives, and property of those there due to the compact layout of apartment buildings and high population density. The ecological safety and sustainable development of buildings are also affected. In this study, PyroSim and Pathfinder software (version 2019) were used to simulate and analyze fire-spreading characteristics based on a multi-story university student apartment building. Additionally, the most effective safe evacuation plan from four fire evacuation drill schemes was identified by analyzing and comparing their performance. Results show that the spreading of fire smoke on different floors is significantly affected by the roof structure and the vertical and horizontal diffusion characteristics of smoke. While the smoke layer at the evacuation stairways has little effect on a safe evacuation, poor visibility due to smoke and ceiling temperatures has a significant effect. Safe evacuation becomes progressively more difficult at different floor levels from the top to the bottom of the building. The optimal safety scheme involves orderly evacuation through two open emergency exits. The number of emergency exits has a significant impact on the evacuation effectiveness. Measures and suggestions have been proposed to deal with apartment fires that address pre-event prevention, emergency loss reduction during the event, and post-event report-back. These proposals form an important theoretical reference for emergency evacuation and student apartment fire safety, providing important guidance for ecological safety protection of buildings and sustainable development.

On group evacuation behavior of subway station halls using an improved evolutionary game model

This study is dedicated to examining the impact of stress on group evacuation behaviors in urban subway station fires, with the ultimate goal of improving evacuation efficiency and enhancing public safety. The authors have introduced an advanced evolutionary game model that combines “selfishness coefficient” and “stress threshold.” This introduces the concept of stress threshold and contributes to the exploration of stress propagation within groups. The simulation results indicate that the degree of selfishness in a crowd significantly affects evacuation efficiency. The emergence and propagation of stress emotions fundamentally represent a large-scale shift in individual evacuation behavior strategies within a group. At the onset of evacuation, the majority of the crowd follows an orderly and organized evacuation process, which occurs before the emergence of group stress. When the overall system benefit falls below the stress threshold, evacuees choose to crowd due to negative emotions and their pre-existing behavior strategies, leading the entire system into a “stress state”. Hence, effective strategies must simultaneously consider both physical methods and stress levels, lowering the threshold for orderly evacuation. For example, measures such as circular broadcasting and sending mobile messages can be employed to promptly inform evacuees about the on-site situation, and staff cab be deployed for guidance and comfort to improve people's sense of security. Analyzing evacuation patterns reveals factors influencing efficiency and individual behaviors, contributing insights to evacuation protocols and applications.

A queuing evacuation model with yielding behavior

A new super queue model with yielding behavior is proposed to model the orderly evacuation process of young pupils in a classroom building. A super queue is composed of a super leader and several simple queues. Based on this, a leader-follower model is proposed to model the orderly behavior between pupils in a super queue, and an exclusive channel model is proposed to model the yielding behavior between super queues. Taking the evacuation of a classroom building as an example, the super queues and yielding behavior are reproduced and are very similar to the actual behavior (both qualitatively and quantitatively). Based on the model, scenarios are simulated to analyze the impacts of several factors on evacuation efficiency. The results show the following: (1) The stop-and-go effect greatly affects the overall evacuation efficiency. Therefore, it is necessary for students to maintain sufficient concentration to shorten their reaction time during the stopping and going process, thereby improving the evacuation efficiency. (2) Different yielding strategies have little impact on the overall evacuation efficiency. Therefore, in an actual evacuation case, flexible yielding strategies can be adopted in order to consider the needs of each class. (3) By optimizing evacuees’ behaviors, such as improving their reaction times, the efficiency of an evacuation with queuing and yielding can become close to that of a disordered evacuation. At the same time, due to its higher safety and easier management process, a queuing and yielding evacuation can be a safe and relatively efficient method for real evacuations.

A smart solution for preventing environmental pollution caused by overflowing onsite sewage septic tank

An innovative remote sensing device for the detection and monitoring of sewage levels in underground onsite septic tank is developed. The overflow of underground onsite sewage septic tanks located around buildings for the collection and disposal of wastewater is hazardous to the environment releasing infectious pollutants and obnoxious contaminants. The inability to accurately determine the level of the sewage in the underground septic tank most times causes overflow of sewage into the environment without the knowledge of the users of the facility. A smart onsite sewage septic tank level monitoring device is developed enabling the users of the facility to promptly detect when it malfunctions to plan ahead for the evacuation in order to prevent the overflow. The device implements ultrasonic sensor to detect and monitor level of the wastewater in the septic tank and a Global System for Mobile Communications (GSM) module to send short message service (SMS) to the enrolled users’ mobile phone numbers and the sewage evacuation agents. A test run conducted showed response time within 30 s. The developed device is suitable for low income countries of Africa.

Draining of Primary Cooling Circuits in Actively Cooled Reactor Components: Modeling the Electrostatic Residual Ion Dump of the ITER Neutral Beam Test Facility

Draining is an important process for in-vessel actively cooled reactor components exposed to the effects of nuclear reactions. Activated corrosion products formed by the water interaction with metals in cooling circuits shall be controlled through coolant evacuation and component confinement in order to avoid spreading of contamination. The process shall be applied to the primary cooling circuits and to the ITER in-vessel actively cooled components, including the components of the neutral beam injectors (NBIs), whose prototype MITICA <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref1" xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">[1]</xref> , <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref2" xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">[2]</xref> is under construction at the ITER Neutral Beam Test Facility in Padua. This work is focused on the electrostatic residual ion dump (ERID) of MITICA, for which the injection of pressurized nitrogen as inert gas is foreseen for blowing out of water from cooling circuits. The process is simulated by means of transient two-phase analyses. Parametric simulations as function of the inlet pressure are carried out to characterize the blowing-out process in terms of evacuation time and draining efficiency.

All Creatures Safe and Sound: The Social Landscape of Pets in Disasters

All Creatures Safe and Sound: The Social Landscape of Pets in Disasters

Metro System Inundation in Zhengzhou, Henan Province, China

In this study, we investigated the flooding accident that occurred on Metro Line 5 in the capital city of Zhengzhou, Henan Province, China. On 20 July 2021, owing to an extreme rainstorm, serious inundation occurred in the Wulongkou parking lot of Zhengzhou Metro Line 5 and its surrounding area. Flooding forced a train to stop during operation, resulting in 14 deaths. Based on our preliminary investigation and analysis of this accident, we designed three main control measures to reduce the occurrence of similar accidents and mitigate the impact of similar accidents in the future, given the increasing number of extreme storm weather events in recent years: (1) to conduct subway flood risk assessments and to establish an early warning system, involving real-time monitoring of meteorological information during subway operation and construction; (2) to improve subway flood control emergency plans and to establish a response mechanism for subway flooding; and (3) to strengthen safety awareness training to ensure the orderly evacuation of people after accidents.

Smart Community Emergency Evacuation Management System and Risk Assessment Based on Mobile Big Data

In recent years, with the continuous expansion and development of cities, urban population has become more and more dense. At present, there are few researches on community emergency evacuation management system in China. Therefore, the establishment of community emergency evacuation management system based on mobile big data can not only meet the efficient, fast, smooth, and orderly evacuation and settlement needs of the masses but also minimize emergencies. All kinds of losses and influences caused by accidents have very important practical significance. In this paper, an emergency evacuation management system is developed and designed on smart community platform based on mobile big data technology. In the process of development, it is found that the service integration method of mobile big data and application model is the best combination of this system. The construction process of community emergency evacuation management system framework is introduced in detail. Through the research and design of the system, and then test and analysis of the experiment, the sixth grade teachers and students of a primary school group experiment, there are 50 people in each group. The experimental group is familiar with the system operation in advance, and the knowledge of emergency evacuation management is previewed in advance. It is concluded that the class with emergency evacuation management system has much faster response time and decision-making time to emergencies than the class without emergency evacuation management system, and the injury situation of the class is much better. The study shows that the emergency evacuation management system plays an important role in dealing with emergencies, improving the escape rate and reducing the number of injured. I believe it will be further promoted in the future.

Simulation of adult-child matching behavior: A case study of primary school in Linyi city, China

Pedestrian evacuation at the gate of primary school after school is always a tricky question bothering us. In order to improve the safety and efficiency of pedestrian evacuation at the gate of primary school, adult–child matching behavior after school is analyzed. We propose four adult–child matching strategies considering order or random of adults and children in the matching process. Fusing the matching strategy into a cellular automata (CA)-based pedestrian simulation model and taking the Linyi No. 40 middle school, China as the case study, the adult–child matching behavior is simulated on the platform of MATLAB software. The simulation results indicate that evacuation efficiency of the strategy (adults are orderly distributed in the first waiting area and children are orderly queuing up) reaches the maximum value among the four strategies. Effective matching strategies could reduce pedestrian conflicts. The randomly children and randomly adults are all the negative impacts for evacuation. Orderly evacuation process could reduce pedestrian conflicts. Compared with the randomly children, the effect on evacuation efficiency of the randomly adults is larger. A reasonable number of evacuated pedestrians at a time could improve the whole evacuation efficiency, and we advise the Linyi No. 40 middle school to evacuate three classes at a time.

An optimization method of multi-objective evacuation path for off-site emergency under severe nuclear accidents

The emergency evacuation path planning measures of nuclear power plants can quickly protect the people from orderly evacuation and effectively prevent the effects of radiation. This paper proposes a multi-objective evacuation path optimization method for off-site emergency evacuation under severe nuclear accidents. This method combines the atmospheric dispersion model, the improved ant colony algorithm and the road resistance model to solve the evacuation path with the least travel time and radiation dose, and introduces the cancer risk probability caused by radiation into the evaluation process. The radiation environment generated by the Monte Carlo method and the hypothetical nuclear accident situation of HPR1000 were respectively optimized for the evacuation path planning under the conditions of nuclear emergency. The results show that the method can obtain multiple reasonable evacuation paths, and can effectively provide decision support for the early emergency response to nuclear accidents, and choose different focused plans.

Characteristics of Fires and Human Damage in Amusement Facilities

Amusement facilities, which include entertainment bars and karaoke bars, can be very vulnerable to fires in terms of use types and spatial characteristics. For this reason, fires and human damage occur often in such facilities. To reduce fires and human damage in amusement facilities efficiently, a careful comparative analysis of the causes of fires, responses, and characteristics of casualties is important, and can assist in uncovering problems and in developing solutions. In this study, a statistical analysis was performed using the following main factors: characteristics of the legal system, safety facilities in amusement facilities, statistics representing the harm prevented by emergency exit installation in amusement facilities, fires and casualties over the last five years, causes of fires, and human damage caused by fires. Compared to other public venues, electrical fires occur in amusement facilities at a high rate, and while the arson rate is especially low (2.8%), the casualty rate is high (72.7%). Therefore, it is important to develop both reasonable electrical safety measures with consideration to the purposes of amusement facilities and the particular needs of the business, and appropriate protocols for evacuation in order to avoid casualties resulting from arson and fires.

CHILD REFUGEES OF THE SPANISH CIVIL WAR

The present work, the product of a research project currently underway, attempts to reflect on forced displacements from a historical perspective, analyzing by means of the study of primary and secondary sources how the term refugee is to be understood, the situation of child refugees of the Spanish Civil War, and the consequences of this war for minors. The paper includes a first approach to the study of the principal ways and mechanisms for evacuation in order to understand how, when, and to what countries people fled and the reactions which humanitarian aid to the child refugees of the Civil War generated. At all times the study maintains a focus on human rights, is framed within the field of study known as Refugee Studies, and is integrated in the historiographical line of inquiry centered in the study of the children of the Spanish Civil War. Taking as a point of departure this line of research this paper attempts to define a more specialized path with which to continue helping to rescue the voice of the historical refugees, and, at the same time, to contribute information which may help to develop more secure ways for refugees and more complete systems of aid and integration, above all for those who are children

Development of a systematic approach and mathematical support for the evacuation process

In modern conditions, due to the vastness of the territory of Kazakhstan, with a certain probability, natural disasters such as earthquakes, floods, avalanches, as well as accidents, destruction of buildings, epidemics, release of chemical toxic substances at industrial enterprises, fires in educational and medical institutions are possible, which justifies the relevance of modern methods and technologies for solving the problem of evacuation. The peculiarity of this work lies in the formation of an integrated approach for organizing the evacuation process both in peacetime as training for the event of an emergency situation (emergency), and in the event of the emergency itself. A conceptual diagram of an evacuation system is proposed that uses heterogeneous sources for receiving and transmitting information about the onset of an emergency. The input and output sources for receiving and transmitting information about the number of people in the building are determined. The main purpose of the system is to form an operational real-time evacuation plan. This work is the result of a phased implementation of an integrated evacuation system, which consists in building a mathematical model and a method for solving the problem of maximum flow in the network. A mathematical model has been developed for the optimal flow distribution along the Grindshiels network with the analysis of the flow formation and the characteristics of people’s motion in enclosed spaces. A game-theoretic approach and mathematical methods of the theory of hydraulic networks for finding an equilibrium state in flow-distribution networks have been developed. An algorithm for solving the evacuation problem using the graph approach is proposed. The results of this paper make it possible to systematically organize training evacuations, prepare resources, train the personnel responsible for evacuation in order to quickly respond in an emergency and carry out the evacuation process in order to avoid major consequences.

Fog-assisted Energy Efficient Cyber Physical System for Panic-based Evacuation during Disasters

Disasters around the world have adversely affected every aspect of life and panic-health of stranded persons is one such category. An effective and on-time evacuation from disaster-affected areas can avoid any panic-related health problems of the stranded persons. Although the nature of disasters differ in terms of how they occur, the evacuation of stranded persons faces approximately same set of issues related to the communication, time-sensitive computation and energy efficiency of the devices operated in the disaster-affected areas. In this paper, a cyber physical system (CPS) is proposed that takes into account various challenges of the disaster evacuation, so an efficient on-time and orderly evacuation of stranded panicked persons could be realized. The system employs fog-assisted mobile and UAV devices for time-sensitive computation services, data relaying and energy-aware computation. The system uses a fog-assisted two-factor energy-aware computation approach using data reduction, which enables the energy-efficient data reception and transmission (DRecTrans) operations at the fog nodes and compensates to extend the period for other functionalities. The data reduction at fog devices employs Novel Events Identification (NEI) and Principal Component Analysis (PCA) for detecting consecutive duplicate traffic and data summarization of high dimensional data, respectively. The proposed system operates in two spaces: physical and cyber. Physical space facilitates real-world data acquisition and information sharing with the concerned stakeholders (stranded persons, evacuation teams and medical professionals). The cyber space houses various data-analytics layers and comprises of two subspaces: fog and cloud. The fog space helps in providing real-time panic-health diagnostic and alert services and enables the optimized energy consumption of devices operate in disaster-affected areas, whereas the cloud space facilitates the monitoring and prediction of panic severity of the stranded persons, using a conditional probabilistic model and seasonal auto regression integrated moving average (SARIMA), respectively. Cloud space also facilitates the disaster mapping for converging the evacuation map to the actual situation of the disaster-affected area, and geographical population analysis (GPA) for the identification of the panic severity-based critical regions. The performance evaluation of the proposed CPS acknowledges its Logistic Regression-based panic-well being determination and real-time alert generation efficiency. The simulated implementation of NEI and PCA depicts the fog-assisted energy efficiency of the DRecTrans operations of the fog nodes. The performance evaluation of the proposed CPS also acknowledges the prediction efficiency of the SARIMA and disaster mapping accuracy through GPA. The proposed system also discusses a case study related to the pandemic disaster of coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19), where the system can help in panic-based selective testing of the persons, and preventing panic due to distressing period of COVID-19 outbreak.

Evolutionary Game of Emergency Evacuation After an Earthquake at a University: How to Promote Orderly Evacuation

Safe and effective evacuation is very important to reduce casualties after earthquakes. Given that evacuation is a checking process rather than a preselection process, evolutionary game theory can be used to better understand the crowd dynamics by analyzing the imitation effects in terms of individual interactions during evacuation. The key purpose of this paper was to construct an evolutionary game model of emergency evacuation of a teaching building at a university after an earthquake to search for the specific constraints necessary to reach the expected collective behaviors for orderly evacuation. We first analyzed the evacuation scenarios, including the environment of the teaching building, emergency degree of the earthquake and behaviors of the crowd. The related game players in the evacuation process were divided into three types, impulsive evacuees, calm evacuees and university staffs, and their payoff matrix was constructed according to the evacuation scenarios. Then, an evolutionary game model via the replicated dynamic system was created, and stable strategies were discussed. Next, we simulated eighteen evacuation scenarios with adjustment of the guiding authoritativeness, emergency degree, and group-oriented coefficient; the simulation results showed that the worst stable strategies can be avoided and the expected stable strategies can be obtained by adjusting the constraints, which are closely related to the corresponding management measures. Finally, the performance of the proposed model was verified by comparisons with the real videos and the conventional strategies.

Improved social force model for rescue action during evacuation

There often exist behaviors of moving against the main direction of evacuation in order to rescue or find the important missing people in real situations. However, the traditional social force model (SFM) often lacks consideration of such “counter flow”. Motivated by this, we improve the traditional SFM to study the counter flow and its influence on evacuation out of multi-exit rooms. We call the person to be rescued “superior” and the rescuers “subordinate”. Two different rescue situations are proposed: superior waiting in place (case 1) and superior moving towards the exit (case 2). The results show that the counter flow will always reduce the evacuation efficiency to a certain extent, and the evacuation efficiency of case 1 is lower than that of case 2. At the same time, for these two cases, increasing the number of rescuers increases the evacuation time. We also find that the existence of counter flow can enlarge the effect of “faster-is-slower”, while increasing the number of exports can significantly improve the rescue efficiency. We hope that this result can help to improve the efficiency of emergency evacuation with rescue.

Selected Aspects of Cooperation Between the Police and the State Fire Service

The necessity of cooperation is dictated by steadily increasing number of threats, which creates the need for continuous cooperation of numerous entities which, by law, possess the ability to support each other in counteracting these threats remaining in the scope of cognizance of cooperating entities and elimination of the consequences of these threats. On the basis of the agreements, the SFS cooperates with various entities involved in rescue operations, including the Police. Cooperation of the SFS and the Police exists in the area of joint rescue operations, public order enforcement, evacuation, training and exercises, as well as in the scope of prevention. Given the data on cooperation so far, it should be stated that most frequently the cooperation between the SFS and the Police occurs in relation to handling road accidents. In the Polish legal system, permanently perfected, there are various standards regulating the sphere of state security, ensuring which on an appropriate level is one of numerous conditions for the secure existence of the state. Improvement of said system is dictated by the common belief that the security was not, is not, and, undoubtedly, will never be a fixed term, but one that must be constantly strived for. The predominant role in this process is played by public administration, including the State Fire Service. Preparation of the State Fire Service to fully and effectively fulfil the connected with it duties is possible primarily due to the proper organization of cooperation.

Two-dimensional evacuation model under the influence of multiple factors

At tourist attractions with large crowds, we have to consider evacuating large Numbers of pedestrians due to an emergency. This paper discusses the evacuation of tourists in emergency, analyzes the possible bottlenecks, and establishes a relatively complete evacuation plan. We considered that although the place is a three-dimensional model, in a certain stage of the evacuation process, each floor is independent of each other, and individuals on different floors do not influence each other. Therefore, according to the fuzzy cellular automata (FCA) model, we adopted the modular processing method to establish the two-dimensional evacuation model initially. First, we established the movement speed and time model of tourists, then introduced obstacle reference factor, direction reference factor and control factor to modify the direction selection of tourists, so as to carry out orderly evacuation.

Louvre Efficient Evacuation Plan Based on LSFFM

For large tourist attraction Louvre, it is essential to establish an emergency evacuation plan for personnel in critical situations. We propose an effective graph-based path planning model, which is suitable for limited space with dense visitors flow. This paper analyze individual’s movement pattern with CA model, regional crowd flow, and overall suboptimal path planning. We establish a limited space fast flow model (LSFFM). Then we apply this evacuation model to the Louvre compared with other out of order evacuation condition. It shows a great performance for evacuation efficiency and visitors’ safety.