Computational Modeling of Nonadaptive Crowd Behaviors for Egress Analysis

The objective of this research is to study human and social behavior for emergency exit in buildings and facilities. Among the numerous regulatory provisions governing a facility design, one of the key issues identified by facility managers and building inspectors is safe egress. Design of egress for places of public assembly is a formidable problem in facility and safety engineering. There have been numerous incidents reported regarding overcrowding and crushing during emergency situation. In addition to injuries and loss of lives, the accompanying post-disaster psychological suffering, financial loss, and adverse publicity have long-term negative effects on related individuals and organizations-the survivors, the victims' families, and the local communities [14]. In a crowded environment, it has been observed that most victims were injured or killed by the so called " non-adaptive " behaviors of the crowd, rather than the actual cause (such as fire) of the disaster [1,8]. Non-adaptive crowd behaviors refer to the destructive actions that a crowd may experience during a disaster, such as stampede, pushing others out of the way, knocking others down, and trampling on others, etc.; these actions are responsible for a large number of injuries and, even, deaths in crowd disasters. To study the non-adaptive behavior in a crowded environment, we need to carefully study human and behavior in panic situation from both the psychological and sociological perspectives. There exists a variety of commercially available computational tools for the simulation and design of emergency exits. However, most of the current computational tools focus on the modeling of spaces and occupancy but rarely take into consideration of crowd behavior. On the other hand, the usefulness of a simulation tool is preconditioned by properly and correctly modeling non-adaptive crowd behaviors. Understanding non-adaptive crowd behaviors is essential to the development of effective egress strategies and models for achieving crowd safety. Although a number of computational crowd models have been developed, none could cover a comprehensive range of scenarios suitable for safety engineering purpose [13]. Most of these models either are oversimplified or are based on incorrect assumptions about crowd behaviors. As noted in a recent report by the Society of Fire Protection Engineers [28], " These (computational) models are attractive because they seem to more accurately simulate evacuations. However, due to the scarcity of behavioral data, they tend to rely heavily on assumptions and it is not possible to gauge with confidence their predictive accuracy. " This seed …