Evacuation Guidance Systems and Initial Response to Disaster

Abstract: In times of disaster, or other emergency situations, it is critical for people to be evacuated in a smooth manner. However, people often tend to panic when faced with disaster, crowding the evacuation passageways of buildings in the event of fire and congesting roads with cars containing people fleeing from predicted hurricanes. In such situations, an evacuation guidance system might be useful. Making people follow guidance may be one of the most important issues of the evacuation system, because it will affect the effectiveness of the evacuation. To understand more precisely how well people will obey the evacuation guidance, conducting an experiment with a huge number of experimental evacuees would be desirable. However, this is not realistic especially for the requirement analysis phase. Therefore, the authors conducted an attitude survey of initial responses to disasters. The results and findings are presented in this paper, for the purpose of making the evacuation guidance system to be more effective.