An Online Survey of Pedestrian Evacuation Model Usage and Users

Abstract

Pedestrian evacuation models are often used to assess life safety in the performance-based design process within fire safety engineering. Within this paper, a summary of data collected via an international online survey regarding the models and users' experiences and needs is presented. This survey consisted of 22 questions focusing on: the assessment of the pedestrian evacuation model user community; their stated importance of model features to select a model; usage/awareness of models; knowledge of model validation and verification; training; and usage of multiple models. As such, the survey allowed the collection of information useful for instructing future pedestrian evacuation model development. The survey represents an expanded version of a previous survey conducted by the authors in 2011. Results with the previous survey were compared to identify any changes in preference and usage by pedestrian evacuation model users. The survey was completed by 234 respondents from 41 countries. The respondents had a wide range of education and occupational backgrounds and use models for a variety of different purposes. The results identified a total of 72 pedestrian evacuation models currently in use and indicated the most known models. In addition, the most used models were identified, and the results highlighted that the three key factors used to select a pedestrian evacuation model are overall consistent with the results of the 2011 survey: verification and validation, documentation, and data output of the model.

EXPOSED: An occupant exposure model for confined spaces to retrofit crowd models during a pandemic

“…One of the great advantages of EXPOSED is that it is not a new microscopic model of occupant exposure, but it can be used either as a post-processor of an existing crowd model or it can be implemented directly within an existing crowd model. To date, over 70 models are already available in the crowd modelling market, thus it was deemed appropriate to develop a model to retrofit existing tools (as they have already a large base of users ( Lovreglio et al, 2019 ) and many have gone through dedicated verification and validation testing ( Ronchi et al, 2014 )) rather than developing a brand new model. Its flexibility along with its simplicity is deemed to encourage its immediate usage and exploitation in the crowd modelling community.…”

“…Crowd models are currently designed for safety/comfort applications such as the optimisation of pedestrian flows or the calculation of evacuation times in case of a threat ( Bellomo et al, 2016 , Bellomo and Dogbé, 2008 , Lovreglio et al, 2019 , Ronchi, 2015 ). Therefore, their ability to investigate occupant exposure is limited, as they are not natively designed for this purpose.…”

“…It appears evident that the simulation of people movement at a microscopic scale could provide a great help to decision makers for risk assessment in case of disease spreading in a confined space. During the COVID-19 pandemic, some of the most known and used crowd models ( Lovreglio et al, 2019 ) have released new features aimed at microscopic modelling of people movement considering social distancing or counting the interactions between pedestrians in a given social distance radius. While these features are useful to evaluate space usage, given the lack of knowledge concerning the current spread of disease, they do not allow a comprehensive quantitative understanding of the impact of different measures on building occupant exposure.…”

Multifactor Variance Assessment for Determining the Number of Repeat Simulation Runs in Evacuation Modelling

“…The factors included in the proposed method are: crowd density, flowrate, queuing time, spatial location and exit usage. This selection was made performing a review of the outputs produced by the most used evacuation models [15] and prioritizing those deemed of key importance within evacuation dynamics for fire safety engineering applications. Note that this list of factors could be tailored for specific evacuation models or application domains depending on the underlying evacuation dynamics and the extent each factor occurs.…”

A Review on the Methods of Evaluating the New Approaches Proposed in the Agile Context

“…Survey is particularly well-suited to studies that are conducted to answer what, how much, and how many questions [23,25]. Currently, an online survey is being widely adopted as it is an optimal approach used for collecting data from a large international despondences [30]. Pahurkar, et al [31] indicated that data that is collected through the online survey study can increase its sample size.…”