The correct and quick evacuation of occupants is very important for the save of lives in a public building when it is attacked by a fire. However, it is difficult to train the occupants for evacuation in a real environment since it is dangerous and expensive. This paper presents a virtual reality system developed by the authors for the simulation of occupant evacuation in an underground station...

Evacuations are a critical aspect of disaster management, and generally the first prevention measure to ensure the safety of the population under threat. Designing evacuation plans is a complex task that requires to take into account multiple factors in order to limit congestion and ensure that all evacuees reach safety in time. This paper proposes a conflict-based path-generation algorithm for...

This commentary reviews the international radiation protection policy that resulted in the evacuation of more than 90,000 residents from areas near the Fukushima Daiichi NPS and the enormous expenditures to protect them against a hypothetical risk of cancer. The basis for the precautionary measures is shown to be invalid; the radiation level chosen for evacuation is not conservative. The action...

Evacuating large numbers of people during a natural disaster or terrorist attack is a vital challenge for emergency management professionals. This is even a continuous pressure on the management in the hurricane zones. Hurricanes Katrina and Rita vividly illustrated this problem. Miles-long traffic jams on the highways during any evacuation in Louisiana and Texas expose the limitations of the r...

The analysis of building evacuation has recently received increasing attention, as people are keen to assess the safety of occupants. Reports on past huge disasters indicate that human behaviors characterize evacuation during emergencies. Understanding and modeling of human behavior enable improved design of society to better reflect the needs of occupants, for example, to reduce evacuation tim...

Let G = (V,E) be a graph modelling a building or road network in which edges have-both travel times (lengths) and capacities associated with them. An edge’s capacity is the number of people that can enter that edge in a unit of time. In emergencies, people evacuate towards the exits. If too many people try to evacuate through the same edge, congestion builds up and slows down the evacuation. Gr...

Natural and man-created disasters, such as hurricanes, earthquakes, tsunamis, accidents and terrorist attacks, have shown the need for quick evacuation. Evacuation routes are mostly based on the capacities of the road network. However, in extreme cases such as earthquakes, road network infrastructure may adversely be affected, and may not supply the required capacities. If for various situation...

In many past fires, not a few people used elevators for their evacuation, although they are told to escape by stairs in emergency. Also, it is expected that the number of people who have difficulty to use stairs in evacuation would become larger, since the proportion of aged people in the total population has been rapidly increasing recently and also accessibility of disabled people has been im...