Disseminating a warning message to evacuate: A simulation study of the behaviour of neighbours

Large-scale evacuations are a recurring theme on news channels, whether in response to major natural or manmade disasters. The role of warning dissemination is a key part in the success of such large-scale evacuations and its inadequacy in certain cases has been a ‘primary contribution to deaths and injuries’ (Hayden et al., 2007). Along with technology-driven ‘official warning channels’ (e.g. sirens, mass media), the role of unofficial channel (e.g. neighbours, personal contacts, volunteer wardens) has proven to be significant in warning the public of the need to evacuate. Although post-evacuation studies identify the behaviours of evacuees as disseminators of the warning message, there has not been a detailed study that quantifies the effects of such behaviour on the warning message dissemination. This paper develops an Agent-Based Simulation (ABS) model of multiple agents (evacuee households) in a hypothetical community to investigate the impact of behaviour as an unofficial channel on the overall warning dissemination. Parameters studied include the percentage of people who warn their neighbours, the efficiency of different official warning channels, and delay time to warn neighbours. Even with a low proportion of people willing to warn their neighbour, the results showed considerable impact on the overall warning dissemination.     

Effect of varying two key parameters in simulating evacuation for a dormitory in China

Student dormitories are both living and resting areas for students in their spare time. There are many small rooms in the dormitories. And the students are distributed densely in the dormitories. High occupant density is the main characteristic of student dormitories. Once there is an accident, such as fire or earthquake, the losses will be cruel. Computer evacuation models developed overseas are commonly applied in working out safety management schemes. The average minimum widths of corridor and exit are the two key parameters affecting the evacuation for the dormitory. The effect of varying these two parameters will be studied in this paper by taking a dormitory in our university as an example. Evacuation performance is predicted with the software FDS + Evac. The default values in the software are used and adjusted through a field survey. The effect of varying either of the two parameters is discussed. It is found that the simulated results agree well with the experimental results. From our study it seems that the evacuation time is not in proportion to the evacuation distance. And we also named a phenomenon of “the closer is not the faster”. For the building researched in this article, a corridor width of 3 m is the most appropriate. And the suitable exit width of the dormitory for evacuation is about 2.5 to 3 m. The number of people has great influence on the walking speed of people. The purpose of this study is to optimize the building, and to make the building in favor of personnel evacuation. Then the damage could be minimized.     

Lattice gas simulation and experiment study of evacuation dynamics

In this paper, evacuation dynamics in an office building is studied by experiment and simulation. A lattice gas (LG) model is developed. A parameter called ‘exit bias’ is introduced into the model to describe the occupants’ familiarity with different exits in a building. The evacuation experiment, which consists of seven scenarios under various conditions, is conducted to verify the model and calibrate the model’s input parameters such as pedestrian speed and exit bias. The effect of exit width on flow rate, and the effect of occupants’ familiarity with the building on their route selections, are studied. It is found that the accuracy of simulation depends a lot on the model’s pedestrian speed. The optimal pedestrian speed is decided by not only occupant characteristics, but also flow features determined by people distribution, building structure, environment pressure, etc. LG models with proper pedestrian speed are capable of simulating the dynamic process of orderly emergency evacuations.     

Multi-objective evacuation routing in transportation networks

In this paper, the optimal design and analysis of evacuation routes in transportation networks is examined. An methodology for optimal egress route assignment is suggested. An integer programming (IP) formulation for optimal route assignment is presented, which utilizes M/G/c/c state dependent queueing models to cope with congestion and time delays on road links. M/G/c/c simulation software is used to evaluate performance measures of the evacuation plan: clearance time, total travelled distance and blocking probabilities. Extensive experimental results are included.     

Crowd evacuation of pairs of pedestrians

The crowd evacuation of pairs of pedestrians (i.e. pairs consisting of a parent and a child) is numerically investigated. Here, it is assumed that all pedestrians have their own partners, and move randomly inside the bounded domain of the right-hand room as an initial state. All pedestrians start their evacuations after they contact their partners. The evacuations are completed by the transfer of all the pairs from the right-hand room to the left-hand room through an exit. A frozen swarm tends to appear in the right-hand room as the total number of pedestrians increases. The frozen swarm moves without changing its form, unless it is dissolved by a strong collision with a pair of pedestrians that comes back from the left-hand room by accident. Finally, the evacuation speed also depends on the area of the Escape Zone, whereas an obstacle placed in front of an exit also changes the speed of the evacuation in accordance with the type of motion of the children.     

Evacuation and a geometric construction for Fibonacci tableaux

Tableaux have long been used to study combinatorial properties of permutations and multiset permutations. Discovered independently by Robinson and Schensted and generalized by Knuth, the Robinson–Schensted correspondence has provided a fundamental tool for relating permutations to tableaux. In 1963, Schützenberger defined a process called evacuation on standard tableaux which gives a relationship between the pairs of tableaux (P,Q) resulting from the Schensted correspondence for a permutation and both the reverse and the complement of that permutation. Viennot gave a geometric construction for the Schensted correspondence and Fomin described a generalization of the correspondence which provides a bijection between permutations and pairs of chains in Young's lattice.In 1975, Stanley defined a Fibonacci lattice and in 1988 he introduced the idea of a differential poset. Roby gave an insertion algorithm, analogous to the Schensted correspondence, for mapping a permutation to a pair of Fibonacci tableaux. The main results of this paper are to give an evacuation algorithm for the Fibonacci tableaux that is analogous to the evacuation algorithm on Young tableaux and to describe a geometric construction for the Fibonacci tableaux that is similar to Viennot's geometric construction for Young tableaux.     

安全疏散模型研究

以四川桑枣中学师生逃生奇迹为背景,用初等数学建模方法建立3种疏散模型对此进行研究,找出人员逃生时间和速度、人与人之间间隙及其他变量之间的关系,并借助实测数据和经验数据对三种模型求解,用于推断四川桑枣中学师生能在1分36秒内成功逃生的可能性.结论是:组织单队(口字模型)疏散是不成功的,组织双队(吕字模型)疏散可以成功,但要把人与人前后之间距离(含人体本身厚度,单位:m)控制在[0.5,0.8]小范围内,速度(单位:m/s)控制在[1.2,1.8]小范围内.而组织三队(品字模型)疏散则更容易成功,控制间距扩大到[0.5,1.3]区间,疏散奔走速度扩大到[0.71,1.72]范围内便可安全疏散.     

Difference between real-life escape panic and mimic exercises in simulated situation with implications to the statistical physics models of emergency evacuation: The 2008 Wenchuan earthquake

In constraining the statistical physics models of emergency evacuation, difference between real-life escape panic and simulated experiment is one of the key issues. We collected and analyzed some of the video recordings of the May 12, 2008, Wenchuan magnitude 8.0 earthquake in southwest China. These video cameras were originally deployed for security purposes, and the earthquake scene records are available from the internet. Analyzing one outdoor scene and three indoor scenes, it is observed that the relation between the arrival time and the order of the person arriving shows a nonlinear variation, which is different from simulated exercises in which this relation appears linear.     

Experimental study and numerical simulation of evacuation from a dormitory

The evacuation process of students from a dormitory is investigated by both experiment and modeling. We investigate the video record of pedestrian movement in a dormitory, and find some typical characteristics of evacuation, including continuous pedestrian flow, mass behavior and so on. Based on the experimental observation, we found that simulation results considering pre-movement time are closer to the experimental results. With the model considering pre-movement time, we simulate the evacuation process and compare the simulation results with the experimental results, and find that they agree with each other closely. The crowd massing phenomenon is conducted in this paper. It is found that different crowd massing phenomena will emerge due to different desired velocities. The crowd massing phenomenon could be more serious with the increase of the desired velocity. In this study, we also found the faster-is-slower effect. When the positive effect produced by increasing the desired velocity is not sufficient for making up for its negative effect, the phenomenon of the greater the desired velocity the longer the time required for evacuation will emerge. From the video record, it can be observed that the mass behavior is obvious during the evacuation process. And the mass phenomenon could also be found in simulation. The results obtained from our study are also suitable to all these buildings in which both living and resting areas occupy the majority space, such as dormitories, residential buildings, hotels (restaurants) and so on.     

Optimal building evacuation time considering evacuation routes

The main purpose of this work is to present a formulation of the building evacuation problem that incorporates evacuation routes and applies the functions developed by Nelson and McLennan [H.E. Nelson, H.A. McLennan (Eds.), Emergency Movement, The SFPE Handbook of Fire Protection Engineering, 1996, pp. 3.286–3.295 (Section 3/Chapter 14)] to model the movement of people. These considerations lead to significant changes in the form of the evacuation and inverse evacuation functions, so it is necessary to develop a new procedure for solving the building evacuation problem.