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...

Residential development in fire-prone wildlands is occurring at an unprecedented rate. Community-based evacuation planning in many areas is an emerging need. In this paper we present a method for using microscopic traffic simulation to develop and test neighborhood evacuation plans in the urban ^wildland interface. The method allows an analyst to map the subneighborhood variation in household e...

The relevance of individual and social human factors in evacuation generally has been accepted, but only few studies aim at determining their specific influence on evacuation behavior. Data come from accident analysis, laboratory experiments, and field studies. A series of studies including passenger counts, passenger interviews and field experiments is reported. Data show that many passengers ...

Simulation study on indoor evacuation has gained tremendous attention in recent years. How to portray the effect of individuals’ uncertain behaviors on the evacuation procedure remains a research challenge. In this study, an agent-based simulation of general indoor evacuation scenarios has been developed. Each individual is modelled as an autonomous agent driven by a weight-based decision-makin...