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Currently, high-rise buildings are being continuously constructed, and thus, it is necessary to predict evacuation safety in advance in case of emergency situations in high-rise buildings. However, current studies focus only on the movement of individuals in evacuation situations for predicting the final evacuation time. Therefore, in this study, a simulation of realistic evacuation in high-rise buildings was performed based on characteristics such as the physical stamina of evacuees. The evacuation simulation was performed on the world's tallest high-rise building, Burj Khalifa, and comparative verification was performed with and without consideration of the physical stamina of evacuees. The results of the simulation indicated that the total evacuation time significantly increases when physical stamina is considered. Hence, realistic evacuation in high-rise buildings is possible when the stamina of evacuees is considered.

It is of crucial importance whether or not evacuees follow the evacuation signs during building evacuation. It is necessary for effective evacuation signs to be designed in a way that helps the occupants follow building safety guidelines. In this paper, 658 evacuation experiments with wearable eye tracking devices were carried out to test the effectiveness of both the setting positions and design of evacuation signs in buildings. There are four factors considered in this paper: (1) position, (2) colour, (3) graphics, and (4) (or flashing). The results show that the effect of the green “arrow” evacuation sign is the best. The effect of low (corridor) signs works better than those of high (room) signs, but the signs of low (corridor) could be blocked by the front evacuees. Obtaining the ratio of people obeying the evacuation signs under different conditions provides an effective basis for the improvement in design for building safety, and provides data support for computer simulation modelling of crowd evacuation.

Guiding the building occupants under fire emergency to a safe place is an open research problem, and finding solutions to address the problem requires a perfect knowledge of the fire building evacuation domain. The use of ontologies to model knowledge of a domain allows a common and shared understanding of that domain, between people and heterogeneous systems. This paper presents an ontology that aims to build a knowledge model to understand the referred domain better and help develop more capable building evacuation solutions and systems. The herein proposed ontology considers the different variables and actors involved in the fire building evacuation process. We followed the Methontology methodology for its developing, and we present all the development steps, from the specification to its implementation with the Protégé tool. info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersion

Dynamic escape route guidance in intelligent buildings offers a great opportunity to evacuate buildings more efficiently and safely in comparison to static escape route guidance. A disadvantage of static escape route guidance is that the system is not able to react to temporary events in the building. In a worst-case scenario, the escape route leads directly into the fire or hazard zone. To investigate this risk, two algorithms for building evacuation have been developed. The first algorithm (static), demonstrates the static evacuation from the building. This is designed to demonstrate the behavior based on rescue and escape route planning, which is currently common used in existing and new buildings. The second algorithm (dynamic) shows how evacuation could take place in an intelligent building using an autonomous system. This implies that the evacuation system is able to react dynamically to the hazards (e.g. fire, toxic gases, or blocked corridors) and replan the escape routes in realtime and visualize them to the occupants inside the building. Both algorithms were investigated on the parameters: Escape route blocked, evacuation time, and length of escape path. The comparison of the algorithms was investigated for randomly generated scenarios and scenarios based on domain knowledge. This study has shown that dynamic escape route guidance has a high potential for improving building evacuation in an emergency situation.

The construction of many tall buildings has brought increased interest in building regulations for timely evacuation. The 9/11 terrorist attacks and the recent fire event in Glenfell Tower in London raise concerns about the effectiveness of evacuation strategies of tall buildings. Thus, a method for finding an optimal evacuation strategy for tall buildings was proposed enabling people to use the available egress components in an optimal way. The introduced method took into consideration the stochastic nature of people’s behaviour, modelling the randomness in decisions of people, and the capacities of egress components. The considered building evacuation procedure required using stairs, evacuation lifts, and refuge floors, where a state-of-the-art evacuation process was modelled. The results indicated that the problem should be considered as multi-objective taking into account the total evacuation time, and the number of people waiting on their floors to start the evacuation in the building. As a case study, a 56-story building with 5400 people was tested, which resulted in a complete evacuation within the period of one hour. Also, the equations for modelling the pre-movement time of people for office buildings were identified enabling the calculation of discharge rate of people during evacuations in tall buildings. The explained modelling approach and subsequent analyses are useful for building designers and should be utilised to examine evacuation design performance of any tall building.

This paper proposes a new network model for the building evacuation problem considering congestion levels and provides a mixed integer linear programming (MILP) model and an efficient heuristic algorithm solving the problem. Constructing an optimization model with several congestion levels, we introduce a new network called the multi-class time-expanded (MCTE) network having several exclusive arcs connecting the same tail and head nodes. The MCTE networks make both the MILP model and the heuristic algorithm reflect a realistic situation in congested networks. Considering MCTE networks makes the problem difficult to solve, which motivates us to develop an efficient heuristic algorithm. We test our heuristic algorithm using several real-world networks such as a multiplex cinema, a subway station, and a large-size complex shopping mall in addition to an artificial network for clear comparison between the proposed algorithm and the MILP approaches. The results indicate that the proposed algorithm runs fast and produces a near-optimal solution compared with those from MILP models with a commercial solver.

An effective evacuation of buildings is critical to minimize casualties due to natural or anthropogenic hazards. Building evacuation models help in preparing for future events and shed light on possible shortcomings of current evacuation designs. However, such models are seldom compared or validated with real evacuations, which is a critical step in assessing their predictive capacities. This research focuses on the evacuation of a K-12 (kindergarten to 12th grade) school located within the tsunami inundation zone of Iquique, Chile. An agent-based evacuation model was developed to simulate the evacuation of approximately 1500 children and staff from the school during a global evacuation drill carried out for the entire city. The model simulates the motions of heterogeneous human agents, and the simulations were validated using video analysis of the real event. Resulting error estimations between predicted versus measured flow rates and evacuation times are 13.5% and 5.9%, respectively. The good agreement between the simulated and measured values can be attributed to the known distribution of students and staff at the start of the drill, and their known exposure to emergency preparedness protocols. However, the results presented herein show that this mathematical evacuation model can be used for logistical changes in the emergency planning.

In this Demo-Paper, we present EvaWeb, a Web Application for simulating the evacuation of buildings with a grid automaton. It is designed to support learning in the domain of mathematical modelling based on real-world problems. EvaWeb allows for 1) creating scenarios consisting of floor plans and persons within the environment, 2) loading and storing these scenarios to a text string, 3) automatically executing these scenarios, and 4) configuring the aesthetics and algorithms used during the execution. EvaWeb can be used online for free at https://evadid.it/eva2.

A three-dimensional geographic information system (3DGIS)-based multi-agent geo-simulation model was developed using the GAMA simulation platform integrating 3D GIS layers and agent-based modelling...

It is difficult to rescue people from outside, and emergency evacuation is still a main measure to decrease casualties in high-rise building fires. To improve evacuation efficiency, a valid and easily manipulated grouping evacuation strategy is proposed. Occupants escape in groups according to the shortest evacuation route is determined by graph theory. In order to evaluate and find the optimal grouping, computational experiments are performed to design and simulate the evacuation processes. A case study shown the application in detail and quantitative research conclusions is obtained. The thoughts and approaches of this study can be used to guide actual high-rise building evacuation processes in future.

In prescriptive fire protection designs of buildings, exit location is generally designed with the constraint of the maximum travel distance. And the optimal exit location has not been given enough attention to in performance-based fire protection designs of buildings. However, in order to improve the reliability of successful evacuation, the optimal exit location for minimizing evacuation time should be studied with consideration of the uncertainty of initial occupant density. Due to the expensive computational cost, the surrogate-based optimization is proposed to search the optimal exit location, which combines the polynomial chaos expansion and genetic algorithm. The polynomial chaos expansion is used to construct the surrogate model of evacuation time and then genetic algorithm is applied to the polynomial chaos expansion of evacuation time to search the optimal exit location. In order to demonstrate the proposed method, a fire compartment of commercial buildings with two exits is presented. The results of this case study suggest that the optimal layout of two exits with the same size should be distributed symmetrically and the optimal exit location is different for different probability levels. When the probability level of successful evacuation is low with two narrow exits, the better method is merging two exits into be one exit around the center of the wall, which is also consistent with that determined by minimizing the maximum travel distance. However, when the probability level of successful evacuation is high with two narrow exits, the optimal location of two exits should be around two corners of the wall in this case. This proposed method can be used to find the suitable exit location under uncertain initial occupant density, which provides a reference for the performance-based design of building exits.

To reduce the casualties of underground shopping malls after a fire and provide a reference for better emergency decision-making, this paper undertakes an in-depth study of the fire evacuation risk in underground shopping malls. First, no theoretical model exists for selecting the fire source location of the existing building evacuation fire. Considering the approach-avoidance behavior of people toward fires during evacuation and assuming the worst-case scenario, the authors propose a multi-exit fire-source-location-selection model. This study then simulates an underground shopping-mall fire using Pyrosim software. Finally, this study improves the existing evacuation risk-assessment model based on previous research and studies on underground buildings using this new model. The model presents the evacuation risk distribution in various areas within the building clearly, providing references for both the fire protection design for underground shopping malls and forming fire-emergency plans. Moreover, the number of people in the building, pre-movement time, and safety exit widths significantly influence fire evacuation risk in underground shopping malls; specifically, the number of people in the building and the pre-movement time are positively correlated with the evacuation risk, whereas the width of safety exits is negatively correlated. The number of people inside the building has the greatest impact on the evacuation risk.

We study a risk-aware multi-level evacuation control problem considering smoke propagation. We propose a continuous-time Markov-chain-based modeling for both population motion and smoke propagation while considering spatial/physical constraints such as walls and/or obstacles. Besides, we formally present some properties of the evacuation model. To do so, we design, in a semi explicit way, a mean-field-risk-aware control that reduces the evacuation time while avoiding the crowd and smoke. Finally, we present numerical examples for evacuation of single-level and multi-level buildings. The multi-level building is Burj Khalifa , the tallest building in the world with 164 floors.

Pedestrian simulation plays an important role in the fields of transport station management, building evacuation and safety management of large public events. Among the continuous pedestrian flow m...

This paper proposes a distributed path planning strategy to provide guidance information for efficient building evacuation in emergency situations by utilizing a cyber-physical system (CPS) with ne...

It is well known that a large percentage of occupants in a building are evacuated together with their friends, families, and officemates, especially in China. Small group behaviors are therefore critical for crowd movement. This paper aims to study the crowd dynamic considering different social relations and the impacts of small groups on crowd dynamics in emergency evacuation. Three experiments are conducted in an 11-storey office building. In the first two experiments, all participants are classmates and know each other well. They are evacuated as individuals or pairs. In the third experiment, social relations among the participants are complex. Participants consist of 8 families, 6 lovers and several individuals. Space–time features, speed characteristics and density–speed relations for each experiment are analyzed and compared. Results conclude that small group behaviors can make positive impacts on crowd dynamics when evacuees know each other and are cooperative. This conclusion is also testified by four verified experiments. In the third experiment, speeds of evacuees are lowest. Small groups form automatically with the presence of intimate social relations. Small groups in this experiment slow down the average speed of the crowd and make disturbance on the crowd flow. Small groups in this case make negative impacts on the movement of the crowd. It is because that evacuees do not know each other and they are competitive to each other. Characteristics of different types of small groups are also investigated. Experimental data can provide foundational parameters for evacuation model development and are helpful for building designers.

Pedestrian merging flows on stairs are defined as the confluence of a flow of pedestrians from a stair and pedestrians from each floor of a multi-storey building. This paper introduces a novel simplified mathematical model for the calculation of evacuation times on stairs which takes into account the impact of merging flows. The model allows calculating the impact of merging ratio (people accessing the stair landing from the floor and from the stair) on pedestrian flows and evacuation times at each floor in congested situations. The assumptions and implementation of the model are presented. A hypothetical model case study of a 10-floor building evacuation is investigated, where the results of the new model are compared with the results of an evacuation simulation model using SimTread. Advantages and limitations of the new model in relation to the existing methods adopted for the simulation of merging flows on stairs are discussed.

A MANET (Mobile Ad Hoc NETwork) is a network that consists of mobile terminals such as smart phones. In MANETs, information messages can be exchanged directly among mobile terminals using wireless networks so that no centralized server or network infrastructure is required. Therefore, MANETs are very well suited as network technology in emergency situations. For providing the users with adequate evacuation routes, the location and behavior of users must be taken into account. This paper presents the simulation evaluation of a MANET-based building evacuation system which considers changes of the evacuation situation over time. In addition, we discuss the influence of different user behavior based on simulation experiments.

Due to the increasing frequency of terrorist attacks all over the world, we designed an emergency evacuation model under the situation of the terrorist attacks. This model uses the Ant Colony Optimization (ACO) as a macro solution, the Cellular Automata (CA) as a micro-control method, and the Queuing Theory Model (QTM) to solve the queuing problem of escape exits. Based on the model we built, the optimized evacuation plan under different conditions were obtained.

Over the past few years, many people have perished owing to serious disasters on ships sailing in high seas. Following tragedies of this kind, more attention has been paid in the area of ensuring onboard passenger safety. Evacuation analysis, aiming at evaluating ship evacuation performance, adopts mathematical models to investigate total evacuation time by taking into account influential factors including pedestrian age, speed and route choice, which is similar to general building evacuation analysis. However, when compared with general buildings, it is noticed that ship evacuation is unique because ships display a six-degree-of-freedom motion feature due to periodic water movement and wind influence. As a result of this feature, the walking characteristics of pedestrians aboard ships show notable differences from level ambulation. Considering this important feature hasn't been incorporated in almost none of the current ship evacuation models, a new model was proposed to explore pedestrian movement dynamics subject to ship motion. Simulation results indicate that this model can capture well-known empirical pedestrian features, and the effects of ship motion on pedestrian movement is complex and unneglectable. The proposed model can thus serve as a useful tool for evaluating passenger ship evacuation performance.

Building occupants must know how to properly exit a building should the need ever arise. Being aware of appropriate evacuation procedures eliminates (or reduces) the risk of injury and death occurring during an existing catastrophe. Augmented reality (AR) is increasingly being sought after as a teaching and training tool because it offers a visualization and interaction capability that captures the learner’s attention and enhances the learner’s capacity to retain what was learned. Utilizing the visualization and interaction capability that AR offers and the need for emergency evacuation training, this paper explores mobile AR application (MARA) constructed to help users evacuate a building in the event of an emergency such as a building fire, active shooter, earthquake, and similar circumstances. The MARA was built for Android-based devices using Unity and Vuforia. Its features include the use of intelligent signs (i.e. visual cues to guide users to the exits) to help users evacuate a building. Inter alia, this paper discusses the MARA’s implementation and its evaluation through a user study utilizing the Technology Acceptance Model (TAM) and the System Usability Scale (SUS) frameworks. The results demonstrate the participants’ opinions that the MARA is both usable and effective in helping users evacuate a building.

Evacuation simulation plays an indispensable role when planning for emergencies and evaluating the consequences of disasters related to airborne toxics. Various attempts have been made to improve simulation of evacuation in toxic environments and to account for the varying concentration levels and the dynamic exposure. However, most studies neglect the reverse effect, how the exposure and dosage levels affect the physical and psychological state of an evacuee and consequently the evacuation path and process. In this work, a fully coupled exposure-response-evacuation and agent based algorithm is proposed, focusing on the H2S airborne toxic. Accordingly, the dynamically estimated exposure of the evacuee affects, non-linearly, the evacuation speed and thus the overall evacuation. This coupling is challenging and thus it depends on the available epidemiological and toxicological data. Nevertheless, the diversity and advantages of the algorithm is successfully demonstrated over three case studies including single- and multi-agent in straight-path and building evacuation scenarios. For example, the building evacuation time increased by more than 50% by inclusion of the aforementioned coupling. In conclusion, herein, a gap on the evacuation modelling is addressed by a fully coupled methodology that could be easily adapted by safety engineers and further improved by researchers as more data become available.

A MANET (Mobile Ad Hoc NETwork) is a network that consists of mobile terminals such as smart phones. In MANETs, information messages can be exchanged directly among mobile terminals using wireless networks so that no centralized server or network infrastructure is required. Therefore, MANETs are very well suited as network technology in emergency situations. For providing the users with adequate evacuation routes, the location and behavior of users must be taken into account. We have already proposed a MANET-based indoor evacuation system for deriving evacuation routes. This paper presents an evaluation framework combining a simulator and mobile devices for supporting the development of the evacuation system. The evacuation guidance system running on a mobile device exchanges messages with the users in the simulator so that the behavior of our software could be evaluated. Various experiments show the suitability of our approach.

A MANET (Mobile Ad Hoc NETwork) is a network that consists of mobile terminals such as smart phones. In MANETs, information messages can be exchanged directly among mobile terminals using wireless networks so that no centralized server or network infrastructure is required. Therefore, MANETs are very well suited as network technology in emergency situations. For providing the users with adequate evacuation routes, the location and behavior of users must be taken into account. This paper presents a MANET-based building evacuation system to derive evacuation routes. In particular, we discuss the influence of different user behavior based on simulation experiments.

Pedestrian merging flows are common in a stairs evacuation process, which involves complex interactions among pedestrians that substantially restrict the efficiency of the stairs evacuation process. Analyzing the pedestrian merging flows process and improving the efficiency of stairs evacuation are urgent and essential tasks. A novel simplified stairs evacuation model for simulating and analyzing the stairs evacuation process, which considers the impact of merging flows, is proposed in this process. The dynamic pedestrian output rate of a floor platform is calculated by the number of pedestrians on the floor platform. The merging ratio determined by the design size of stairs is adopted to determine the ratio between the stairs pedestrian flow and the floor pedestrian flow in the pedestrian output rate of the floor platform. To evaluate the stairs evacuation process is divided into three stages based on the pedestrian merging flows process, and the evacuation time at each stage is computed by the dynamic pedestrian output rate of the floor platform. The stairs evacuation capacity is calculated by the evacuation time and the number of pedestrians. A case study of a six-floor building evacuation is investigated, and the reliability and feasibility of the proposed model is verified. By establishing different merging ratios, the optimal merging ratio is obtained by comparing the evacuation capacities of different merging ratios, which provides a reference of stairs design for designers.

We discuss an approach for spatial discrete-event Modeling and Simulation (M&S) of crowds using the Cell-DEVS formalism, which provides some advantages over existing crowd modeling approaches, as it provides a trade-off between the simulated granularity level and the computational requirements. We explain through simple one- and two-dimensional models how Cell-DEVS is used to build pedestrian models. Furthermore, the usability of the approach is verified by employing it in real-life case studies. We discuss different case studies, employing the Cell-DEVS approach to build a model for a general building evacuation, and a fire evacuation model.

This paper attempts to design an intelligent simulation model for pedestrian crowd evacuation. For this purpose, the cellular automata(CA) was fully integrated with fuzzy logic, the kth nearest neighbors (KNN), and some statistical equations. In this model, each pedestrian was assigned a specific speed, according to his/her physical, biological and emotional features. The emergency behavior and evacuation efficiency of each pedestrian were evaluated by coupling his or her speed with various elements, such as environment, pedestrian distribution and familiarity with the exits. These elements all have great impacts on the evacuation process. Several experiments were carried out to verify the performance of the model in different emergency scenarios. The results show that the proposed model can predict the evacuation time and emergency behavior in various types of building interiors and pedestrian distributions. The research provides a good reference to the design of building evacuation systems., Comment: 10 pages

In order to improve the efficiency of occupant evacuation in high-rise and intelligent buildings, this paper analyzes the disadvantages of traditional emergency evacuation in high-rise buildings and conducts the feasibility analysis of using an elevator as the evacuation tool. With the help of evacuation software, Pathfinder, simulation experiments are given to study the collaborative strategies among stairs and elevators under partial and total building evacuation. Results show that with the guarantee of safety and reliability, an elevator is a very efficient tool to evacuate occupants in high-rise buildings, especially those mobility impaired occupants. Combination of stairs and elevator can not only reduce the evacuation time but also shorten the occupants’ travel distance.

The evacuation channel is an important way to connect the room and the security exit. This paper studies the impact of queuing behavior on the evacuation of people in the building channel. In this paper, Considering the factors of evacuation channel width, personnel density and speed, queuing form, different queuing queues, etc., using Massmotion software simulation. The research shows that for different queuing methods, the evacuation efficiency of queuing by shares is less affected by the width of the channel, there is a critical channel width for the evenly divided queues, and the evacuation efficiency of the different queuing queues is inconsistent; under different widths, the personnel density and speed have different evacuation efficiency Law of influence. The research in this paper can provide a certain reference for the design of building evacuation.

One of the most critical issues in every country's Buildings National Regulations is a fast and convenient building evacuation on fire and emergency. Educational spaces beside stadiums, subway stations, and tall buildings are supposed among the most accumulative and crowded public areas. Holding maneuvers, monitoring the evacuation process, and extracting the probability distribution functions of operations, we can simulate the evacuation and be hopeful of analyzing the process successfully. In this article, at first, observations and precise details of the held maneuver in an elementary school besides pathological points on students' behavior on building evacuation are given. We introduce the extracted distribution functions; after that, based on these distribution functions and thanks to the Pathfinder simulator, we simulate the maneuver. Finally, we investigate the impact of parameters like stairs wide, landing depth, and even form of stairs on evacuation time. It is evident that because of user's congruency in all elementary schools, using the data produced in this research, it is possible to analyze the evacuation process in every other elementary school, even those that are unbuilt.

Fire emergencies impose significant threats to building occupants. During evacuation, fire has significant impacts on evacuees' behaviors, by e.g., changing their route availability, disturbing their perception of the environment due to reduced visibility, impairing their mobility that is usually associated with severe injuries, and causing significant mental stress that may lead to complicated and unpredictable navigation decisions. Despite the detrimental effects of fire on crowd evacuation, most existing building evacuation simulation models and tools do not account for the impacts of fire on the evacuation process; at most they rely on oversimplified assumptions and simulation settings. In this study, a new fire evacuation simulation model, named FREEgress (Fire Risk Emulated Environment for Egress), is developed to simulate the dynamic influences of heat, temperature, toxic gas and smoke particles on evacuees' mobility, navigation decision making and health conditions. FREEgress (1) introduces evacuee agents who are aware of and able to assess the fire hazards, and can make fire risk-informed navigation decisions; and (2) models the interactions between evacuee agents and the dynamic fire emergency environments and the consequent evacuation process. The verification of FREEgress is conducted by comparing its simulation results with two existing simulation tools, SAFEgress and FDS + Evac. In addition, a case study using FREEgress is carried out to simulate the evacuation in a museum for 30 different fire emergency scenarios. The simulation results are analyzed to assess the impacts of three important factors, namely initial fire location, evacuation delay time and evacuee behavior, on the evacuation process and evacuation outcomes. The case study demonstrated the potential value of FREEgress to support both the safety design of new buildings and maintenance and emergency management of constructed facilities.

Evacuation signage playsa vital role in building evacuation. In order to test the efficiency of evacuation signage, the traditional methods are video analysis and after-drill questionnaires and the human factors are rarely considered. This paper investigates the impact of surrounding pedestrians on the sign guidance efficiency during building emergency evacuation, replacing the traditional ways with eye tracking device method. More than 500 participants wereinvolved in the series of experiments to testthe influence of surrounding people on detecting and following signages. It is found that a) the subjective ignorance and objective ignorance of signs exist obviously and areaffected by surrounding people number; b) strangers and acquaintances have similar effect on the sign detection probability and direction choosing probability in the safe and quick evacuation experiments, contrary to general belief; c) One surrounding personhas an important influence on the sign guidance effect, especially on the following probability, while three surrounding peoplenot. Based on the results of the experiments, a new logic of wayfinding within rooms was put forward and simulated to compared with the original logic. It is shown that the average right direction choosing percentage decreases by30% after considering the effect of surrounding pedestrians, proving that the impact of surrounding pedestrians must be considered in evacuation modeling and evacuation route design.

Emergency evacuations are typically employed in airport terminal buildings to protect occupants against harmful events such as fires and security incidents. Despite the importance of ensuring the effectiveness of planned for evacuation procedures, little research has been conducted to obtain a better understanding of these events, largely due to a lack of data. This paper describes how a new database containing details of airport terminal building evacuation events (ATBEE) was created, and utilised to explore the characteristics of these events. Online news articles were used as the main source material to populate the database with events. The completed database was subjected to a data quality assessment procedure, and a new quantitative index was developed to assess the reliability of the news articles utilised as source material. The database currently contains situational and etiological details of 235 evacuation events that occurred during the period January 2016 to December 2017. Analysis of the database contents determined the majority of evacuation events recorded occurred in North America and Europe, and the main cause of these events were security and terrorism related incidents, such as the identification of suspicious items. Statistical testing indicated an association exists between the geographical location of the recorded evacuations and the cause of an evacuation, and also the evacuation’s cause and the total evacuation time. A significant correlation was furthermore found between the number of evacuation events occurring at an airport, and the size of the airport.

Evacuation effectively mitigates potential harm for building occupants in case of emergencies. Virtual and Augmented Reality (VR and AR) have emerged as research tools and means to enhance evacuation preparedness and effectiveness. Unlike VR, where users are immersed in computer-generated environments, the more novel AR technology allows users to experience digital content merged into the real world. Here, we review current (2020) relevant literature on AR as a tool to study and improve building evacuation triggered by a variety of disasters such as fires, earthquakes or tsunami. Further, we provide an overview of application goals, existing hardware and what evacuation stages can be influenced by AR applications. Finally, we discuss strengths, weaknesses, and opportunities (SWOT) of AR to study evacuation behaviour and for research purposes.

A basic cellular automaton model does not consider social forces interaction in building evacuation thus could not explain complex crowd evacuation processes. This study developed a cellular automaton model on social forces interaction in building evacuation, where the positive and negative impacts of social forces on evacuation time were simulated and analyzed. The model was verified using experimental data. The clustering attraction between people always increased the evacuation time regardless of the number of evacuees, the building size, the number of exits, and the people distribution, thus the clustering attraction is always to be avoided. When people in a room were randomly and evenly distributed, the repulsive force of obstacles, the attractiveness of evacuation direction, and the repulsive force of exit congestion played negligible roles on the evacuation time thus could be ignored. The evacuation path could be optimised by adjusting the influence coefficients of social forces to reduce the evacuation time.

The number of large public buildings is growing rapidly in function and complexity, which cause the evacuation path in case of fire to be too long and complex increasing the evacuation time. In this paper, a constraint-based design approach is introduced to automatically generate the optimal position of the building evacuation door to minimize the length of the escape route, thus reducing the evacuation time. The position of the evacuation doors is ruled by design specifications and building structures, in this study, a constraint-based model which includes space constraints and design constraints is proposed to generate the optimal door positions which minimize evacuation distance. The optimal combinations of the evacuation doors positions are obtained with the branch and bound algorithm in the model. Compared with the existing work, this approach avoids repeated modification of the design drawings and has significantly reduced the evacuation time by automatically generating optimal door positions. In this paper, two different size case studies from two museums are analyzed to explain the performance of the proposed method. The results indicate that the evacuation door layout generated by our approach outperforms the original layout.

Presently, most models of crowd evacuations within a building are created manually. This is inefficient. To address this issue, this paper focuses on the differences and relationship between industry foundation classes (IFC) and the macroscopic network model for evacuation (MNME), and studies the mapping and construction methods used to convert entity objects into nodes and arcs in the MNME. Furthermore, corresponding attribute information in the MNME are established from IFC. Based on this process, the MNME is created and used as an input to EVACNET4 to obtain simulation results. Finally, the results, together with a 3D building model, are expressed in a unified environment. Our study results show that a network as well as the relevant attributes can be automatically generated from IFC, and can be adapted to different working conditions. The method proposed in this paper can automatically map the semantic information model to the MNME and the simulation result as well as the building model can be integrated in a Geographic Information System (GIS) environment.

There are various egress components for high-rise building evacuation during an emergency. It is recommended to use these components depending on the type of scenario, but it is important to note that there are certain advantages and disadvantages associated with these egress components. The concept of deciding suitable fire safety system of the building, i.e., available safe evacuation time (ASET) and required safe evacuation time (RSET) is very important while deciding their use. Apart from these egress components, there are few important evacuation strategies which can be used during building evacuation. To study different characteristics of evacuation of the building using various egress components, few computerized fire models are available, but we need further better evacuation strategies, considering the limitations associated with these egress components.

An evacuation model combining alterable accessibility and human awareness.The agent awareness of accessibility is reflected by both spatial and event knowledge.The alterable accessibility is represented by a semantic model and is timely updated.The spatial change has a negative effect when detouring occurs due to a lack of knowledge.The spatial change has a positive effect when the exit utilization is balanced. The building environment and evacuation behavior are decisive factors for building evacuation performance. Shifting toward the use of agent-based models, many current studies have considered the heterogeneous evacuation behavior resulting from an individualized perception of the building environment, but few studies have incorporated the evacuees' awareness of the predictable change in the spatial accessibility by activated fire safety facilities during emergency scenarios. To investigate the specific influence of such spatial change on the evacuation performance, this study presents an agent-based building evacuation model in which the evacuee's knowledge, including both the spatial knowledge of the stationary environment during a normal situation and the event knowledge of the predictable spatial change for fire-fighting purposes, is considered. In addition, a semantic representation of building environment is developed to represent the alterable connectivity structure when considering the fire safety facilities. Using the proposed model, a series of evacuation simulations have been conducted for groups of evacuees with different knowledge levels during three specific fire scenarios. The simulation results suggest that the proposed model can evaluate the potential influence of the spatial change on the evacuation efficiency, which is dependent on the evacuees' knowledge level and the location of the fire safety facilities. The model, although a prototype at this stage, will facilitate more realistic evacuation simulation in fire emergency scenarios and will support building evacuation management.

The paper describes a simulation application for the process of evacuating people from a building in the event of a fire. This simulation was developed as an agent system using the DEVS formalism. The following sections show the design and implementation of such a system using the Adevs library. A series of simulation tests were then performed for different simulation scenarios.

Evacuation indicator is an important factor affecting evacuation efficiency during emergency evacuation. In order to study the relationship between the distribution of human’s points of regard and evacuation indicators during building evacuation, this paper carried out two groups of building emergency evacuation experiments, to get the data of human’s points of regard, one of the experimenters was selected to put on eye tracker during the experiment. This paper presents a method to preprocess the data of eye tracker and further analyzes the pretreatment results. The results show that evacuation indicators in different areas are suitable for different placement, which based on the position distribution of human’s points of regard. For example, evacuation indicators in the corridor are suitable for higher placement, and evacuation indicators in the staircase are suitable for lower placement.