The simulation of urban-scale evacuation scenarios with application to the Swinley forest fire

Abstract

Forest fires are an annual occurrence in many parts of the world forcing large-scale evacuation. The frequent and growing occurrence of these events makes it necessary to develop appropriate evacuation plans for areas that are susceptible to forest fires. The buildingEXODUS evacuation model has been extended to model large-scale urban evacuations by including the road network and open spaces (e.g. parks, green spaces and town squares) along with buildings. The evacuation simulation results have been coupled with the results of a forest fire spread model and applied to the Swinley forest fire which occurred in Berkshire, UK in May 2011. Four evacuation procedures differing in the routes taken by the pedestrians were evaluated providing key evacuation statistics such as time to reach the assembly location, the distance travelled, congestion experienced by the agents and the safety margins associated with using each evacuation route. A key finding of this work is the importance of formulating evacuation procedures that identifies the threatened population, provides timely evacuation notice, identifies appropriate routes that maintains a safe distance from the hazard front thereby maximising safety margins even at the cost of taking longer evacuation routes. Evacuation simulation offers a means of achieving these goals.

Modeling and mapping dynamic vulnerability to better assess WUI evacuation performance

“…Vulnerability assessment reflects both sides of a typical performance‐based approach: the nature of the incident and the effectiveness of the human response to prepare, address, and cope with it given the resources available (structural, environmental, responder, access, human, etc.). Unlike typical performance‐based design, such assessment requires an integrated approach that provides additional insights (not just better versions of the same insights) for building and community level incidents . Morrow noted that the impact of a natural incident on a subpopulation is not entirely down to chance; instead, it is affected by the capacity of the community to respond given the social and physical resources available to them (ie, both preexisting and emergency characteristics) .…”

“…Numerous research efforts have been conducted to identify factors that influence actor response to different natural incidents and the level at which these factors operate . For instance, Faulkner et al examined the factors that influenced homeowner response to wildfire incidents .…”

“…Previous approaches to hazard mapping have been criticised, because the maps themselves were often reliant on outdated, incomplete, or inconsistent data (see Veeraswamy et al). It is assumed here, however, that we will eventually have access to more comprehensive, contemporaneous, and refined information.…”

Applied Artificial Bee Colony Optimization Algorithm in Fire Evacuation Routing System

“…The main paradigms in evacuation studies are optimization-based methods that help legislators to generate evacuation plans by offering useful tools such as network optimization models, scheduling optimization models, and routing optimization models [3]. The quickly spread of fire can cause the best escape route changes, which makes the situation more chaotic and unorganized [18]. Most evacuees use the routes that they are familiar with [13].…”

“…Human behavior in a fire has been extensively studied from various perspectives as summarized in Table 1. Although many studies have been extensively conducted in this field, some assumptions about the existing paradigm of fire safety, particularly in building area, are not consistent with knowledge generated in the literature [18,19]. Therefore, there is a substantial need for incorporating new scientific heuristic/metaheuristic knowledge, which can be supplemented.…”