Risk‐Field Based Modeling for Pedestrian Emergency Evacuation Combined with Alternative Route Strategy

Abstract

For the past decades, with the frequent occurrence of emergencies, such as stampede, fire, and terrorist attack, the urgent requirements of developing realistic evacuation models to describe pedestrian and disaster dynamics are put forward. In this paper, an extended floor-field (FF) model combined with risk factors is presented for emergency evacuation. A novel dynamic rerouting mechanism is designed to elucidate the exit choice behavior of evacuees, and meanwhile, a recommended dynamic risk-field model is fully explored to deal with dynamical features of disaster. The proposed model is validated through numerical simulations with specific room structures. The effects of model parameters on evacuation efficiency and death toll are analyzed in detail. Simulation results show that the proposed model is effective and has a positive influence on evacuees’ exit choice behavior, and the death toll is closely related to the perceived information obtained by evacuee, such as the crowd density during the evacuation process.

Risk Reduction Strategies against Terrorist Acts in Urban Built Environments: Towards Sustainable and Human-Centred Challenges

“…In this sense, future challenges in RMRSs' definition and assessment will move towards a human-centred perspective, as for other kinds of SUOD such as fires, so as to check how the BE users' control and support can be achieved in all these different scenarios of BE use. Current RMRSs solutions to increase people's safety against terrorist attacks are limitedly based on data nearer to reality [40,44,[64][65][66]. On the contrary, many simulation models were developed in the past, and they also included the effects of the terrorist acts on the BE, but most of them adopted general purpose behaviours (e.g., those related to fire egress) and only a few of them were based on effective evacuation scenarios from terrorist acts [40,[67][68][69][70].…”

“…On the contrary, many simulation models were developed in the past, and they also included the effects of the terrorist acts on the BE, but most of them adopted general purpose behaviours (e.g., those related to fire egress) and only a few of them were based on effective evacuation scenarios from terrorist acts [40,[67][68][69][70]. Such modelling issues can beneficially assume microscopic approaches due to the possibility of representing the interactions among attackers, attack actions and occupants over time and space (e.g., by pursuing a social-force based [67,70] or a cellular automata [66,69] approach, also integrating agent-based models [71]). Thus, further efforts to provide reliable databases on terrorist act-related emergencies are urgently needed and they should include the possibility of simulating the effects of the adopted RMRSs [33].…”

“…Thus, further efforts to provide reliable databases on terrorist act-related emergencies are urgently needed and they should include the possibility of simulating the effects of the adopted RMRSs [33]. In this way, these studies could fully include a human-centred approach into RMRSs' planning practices to support decision-makers [31,40,66]. The database outcomes could be used for preliminary activities related to the development, evaluation and validation of behavioural emergency evacuation simulators for terrorist attacks in the BE, especially if related to specific case studies.…”

Visualization of Emergency Evacuation Physical Behavior under Multi-Agent Decision-Making

“…With the rapid development of computer simulations, researchers have introduced these physical behaviors into simulation models for the evaluation of fire safety design of buildings and solutions for behavioral factors [10]. For such problems, evaluation models at this stage are divided into two main categories: macroscopic and microscopic [11][12][13][14][15]. Macro is mainly studied for theoretical purposes, analyzing pedestrian movement characteristics, bottleneck effects, and crowding phenomena using more advanced model effects.…”

Emergency Evacuation of Hazardous Chemical Accidents Based on Diffusion Simulation

“…C. Wang and J. Wang (2017) [21] presented an extended floor-field (FF) model combined with risk factors for emergency evacuation and they validated model through numerical simulations with specific room structures.…”