By using a simplified two-lane cellular automata model for traffic flow, we simulate an evacuation of an emergency vehicle (EV) in highways. We introduce the pull over strategy to facilitate the evacuation of the EV in highways. We demonstrate numerically that this pulling over of cars promotes a faster moving of the EV in traffic flow and minimize the EV's impact on the overall traffic.
People often help others who are in trouble, especially in emergency evacuation situations. For instance, during the 2005 London bombings, it was reported that evacuees helped injured persons to escape the place of danger. In terms of game theory, it can be understood that such helping behavior provides a collective good while it is a costly behavior because the volunteers spend extra time to assist the injured persons in case of emergency evacuations. In order to study the collective effects of helping behavior in emergency evacuations, we have performed numerical simulations of helping behav…
Emergency evacuation of patients from a hospital can be challenging in the event of a fire. Most emergency evacuation studies are based on the assumption that pedestrians are ambulant and can egress by themselves. However, this is often not the case during emergency evacuations in healthcare facilities such as hospitals and nursing homes. To investigate emergency evacuations in such healthcare facilities, we performed a series of controlled experiments to study the dynamics of patient beds in horizontal movement. We considered a patient bed because it is one of the commonly used devices to tra…
Metro systems are part of major transportation systems for big cities. Evacuation is a key challenge for metro systems in case of fire or terrorist attacks. In case of evacuation, wheelchair-assisted evacuees might take a longer time. In order to understand the effect of assisted and non-assisted evacuees on evacuation, a simulation is conducted in this study. Platform evacuation and train evacuation simulation are done. A train load survey is conducted to understand the number of evacuees inside a train. Two different layouts of stations are considered, underground island-type platforms and e…
We study how the presence of committed volunteers influences the collective helping behavior in emergency evacuation scenarios. In this study, committed volunteers do not change their decision to help injured persons, implying that other evacuees may adapt their helping behavior through strategic interactions. An evolutionary game theoretic model is developed which is then coupled to a pedestrian movement model to examine the collective helping behavior in evacuations. By systematically controlling the number of committed volunteers and payoff parameters, we have characterized and summarized v…
Traffic evacuation plays a critical role in saving lives in devastating disasters such as hurricanes, wildfires, floods, earthquakes, etc. An ability to evaluate evacuation plans in advance for these rare events, including identifying traffic flow bottlenecks, improving traffic management policies, and understanding the robustness of the traffic management policy are critical for emergency management. Given the rareness of such events and the corresponding lack of real data, traffic simulation provides a flexible and versatile approach for such scenarios, and furthermore allows dynamic interac…
A decade on from the devastating Black Saturday bushfires in Victoria, Australia, we are at a point where computer simulations of community evacuations are starting to be used within the emergency services. While fire progression modelling is embedded in strategic and operational settings at all levels of government across Victoria, modelling of community response to such fires is only just starting to be evaluated in earnest. For community response models to become integral to bushfire planning and preparedness, the key question to be addressed is: when faced with a bushfire, what will a comm…
Major disasters such as extreme weather events can magnify and exacerbate pre-existing social disparities, with disadvantaged populations bearing disproportionate costs. Despite the implications for equity and emergency planning, we lack a quantitative understanding of how these social fault lines translate to different behaviors in large-scale emergency contexts. Here we investigate this problem in the context of Hurricane Harvey, using over 30 million anonymized GPS records from over 150,000 opted-in users in the Greater Houston Area to quantify patterns of disaster-inflicted relocation acti…
The escape panic version of the Social Force Model (SFM) is a suitable model for describing emergency evacuations. In this research, we analyze a real-life video, recorded at the opening of a store during a Black Friday event, which resembles an emergency evacuation (November 2017, South Africa). We measure the flow of pedestrians entering the store and found a higher value ($\langle J \rangle =6.7 \pm 0.8\,$p/s) than the usually reported in ``laboratory'' conditions. We performed numerical simulations to recreate this event. The empirical measurements were compared against simulated evacuatio…
This research explores the dynamics of emergency evacuations in the presence of social groups. The investigation was carried out in the context of the basic Social Force Model (SFM). We included attractive feelings between people belonging to the same social group, as proposed in Int. J. Mod. Phys. C 27(6),1-16. We focused on the escaping dynamics through an emergency exit and through a corridor. We confirmed the results appearing in Int. J. Mod. Phys. C 27(6),1-16 for a desired velocity of 4 m/s, but further extended the analysis on the emergency exit to the range 1-8 m/s. We noticed that the…
Effects of Data Resolution and Human Behavior on Large Scale Evacuation Simulations
基于交通分析区的宏观仿真研究主要应用于疏散规划和疏散操作领域。TAZ的大尺寸和宏观模拟的聚集信息低估了真实的疏散性能。为了利用高分辨率的人口数据LandScan USA（区域大小比TAZ小得多）和基于代理的微观交通仿真模型，出现了许多新的问题，需要新的解决方案。利用LandScan USA Population Cells（LPC）数据，对不同路网配置、出行需求模型和出行者遵从行为下的疏散分配进行了一系列研究。首先，一个新的多源最近目的地最短路径（MSNDSP）的问题被定义为生成的起源-目的地矩阵疏散分配时，使用LandScan数据集。其次，提出了一种新的基于代理的交通分配框架，使用LandScan和TRANSIMS模块的疏散规划和操作研究。研究了交通分析区域分辨率（TAZ与LPC）、疏散开始时间（白天与夜间）和出发时间选择模型（正常S形模型与基于位置的模型）的影响分析。第三，基于所提出的框架，多尺度网络配置（两个层次的道路网络和两个尺度的区域大小）和三个路由方案（最短网络距离，公路偏向，最短直线距离路线）的疏散性能比较研究。第四，为了研究疏散操作对人的行为的影响，分析了从完全遵守到完全不遵守的遵守行为。
Improving emergency evacuations is a top priority in human safety and in pedestrian dynamics. In this paper, we use the social force model, in order to optimize high-anxiety pedestrian evacuations. We explore two architectural layouts, the 1-door vestibule, and the 2-doors vestibule. The "vestibule" is defined as the room next to the exit door and it is characterized by two structural parameters: the vestibule width ($d$) and the vestibule door width ($w$). We found that, specific values of $d$ and $w$, can almost double the evacuation flow compared to the no-vestibule scenario. The key to thi…
