Title of dissertation: DEVELOPMENT OF A MIXED-FLOW OPTIMIZATION SYSTEM FOR EMERGENCY EVACUATION IN URBAN NETWORKS Xin Zhang, Doctor of Philosophy, 2012 Dissertation directed by: Professor Gang-len Chang Department of Civil & Environmental Engineering In most metropolitan areas, an emergency evacuation may demand a potentially large number of evacuees to use transit systems or to walk over some ...

BACKGROUND Hospital fires present a sporadic but significant threat to patients and staff. This is especially so within an intensive care unit (ICU) setting, due to the complexity of moving acutely unwell patients reliant on invasive monitoring and organ support. Despite an average of 500 in-hospital fires reported to the UK department of health per annum, causing 65 injuries and 1-2 fatalities...

Recent studies of past disastrous accidents have shown that human behavior plays a crucial role affecting evacuation time and patterns. For example, in the 9/11 World Trade Center studies, people demonstrated helping behaviors, even towards strangers, while evacuating [1]. Decision to evacuate depends on many human factors, such as presence of authorities and individual’s experience and familia...

This report summarizes the results of an initial, four month project demonstrating the applicability of the DITOPS scheduling system to USTRANSCOM’s Aeromedical Evacuation (MEDEVAC) re-planning problem. DITOPS is an advanced prototype system developed at Carnegie Mellon University for development, analysis and revision of large-scale schedules, applied originally to the logistics domain of stra...

We present a proof-of-concept agent-based simulation tool, for use in training by emergency services in Australia, for planning community evacuations in the event of a severe bushfire threat. The tool allows Incident Controller personnel to interactively schedule the evacuation of a town area, by sub-region, and then evaluate the effectiveness of their plan in terms of traffic flow and overall ...

Introduction: Accidental hypothermia occurs very rarely. Japan experienced hypothermic victims in the 2011 earthquake and tsunami disaster. In northern Japan, where largest class of earthquakes tsunamis are estimated, study for countermeasures has been advanced. The progression varies significantly by individual differences environmental factors, it is considered to be challenging assess its da...