Integrating Human Factors into Evacuation Simulations - Application of the Persona Method for Generating Populations

For assessing evacuation dynamics in disaster situations, current approaches of pedestrian simulations increasingly include additional human characteristics. One aim is to assess realistic effects of structural changes of an infrastructure on evacuation behavior displayed by users. Creating agents with supplementary physical and psychological human characteristics and assembling the agents in accordance to the user’s population may be beneficial not only to support decision making. The analysis of simulated effects of, e.g., informational strategies will foster crisis and disaster management. This paper combines knowledge about users in subway systems and highlights benefits of using the Persona method to improve objectivity in the specification of different user types. Persona method is adapted to pedestrian simulation. Using data from the authors ́ field studies, personas are developed and implemented for an evacuation simulation. First findings suggest that including personas into pedestrian simulation influences the results with respect to the required safe evacuation time (RSET).