IntroductionThis paper presents a multi-agent based framework to simulate human and social behaviors during emergency evacuations. Among the many regulatory provisions governing a facility design, one of the key issues identified by facility managers and building inspectors is safe egress. Design of egress for places of public assembly is a formidable problem in facility and safety engineering. There have been numerous incidents reported regarding overcrowding and crushing during emergency situations [1]. In addition to injuries and loss of lives, the accompanying post-disaster psychological suffering, financial loss, and adverse publicity have long-term negative effects on the affected individuals and organizations -the survivors, the victims' families, and the local communities.Among the many factors including overcrowding and evacuation incidents, researchers have come to realize that understanding human and social behaviors in emergencies is crucial to improve crowd safety in places of public assembly [2][3][4][5][6]. In particular, 'nonadaptive crowd behaviors' are recognized to be responsible for the death and injury of most victims in crowd disasters [7]. Nonadaptive crowd behaviors refer to the destructive actions that a crowd may experience in emergency situations, such as stampede, pushing, knocking, and trampling on others. Studying nonadaptive crowd behaviors in emergency situations is difficult since it often requires exposing real people to the actual, possibly dangerous, environment. A good computational tool that takes into consideration the human and social behavior of a crowd could serve as a viable alternative.Commercially available computational tools for the simulation and design of emergency exits exist. However, most of the current computational tools focus on the modeling of spaces and occupancies but rarely take into consideration of human and
There exist a wide variety of computational tools for the simulation and design of exits. However, due to the scarcity of behavioral data, these tools rely heavily on the assumptions about human individual and social behaviors. Many of these assumptions have been found inconsistent or incorrect. This paper presents a multi-agent based framework for studying human and social behavior during building emergency evacuations. A prototype system has been developed, which is able to demonstrate some emergent human social behaviors, such as competitive, queuing, and herding behaviors.
This paper presents a method to determine if a usable wheelchair accessible route in a facility exists using motion-planning techniques. We use a`performance-based' approach to predict the performance of a facility design against requirements of a building code. This approach has advantages over the traditional`prescriptive' code-based approach for assessing acceptability of designs, which is normal practice today for assessing wheelchair accessibility. The prescriptive method can be ambiguous, contradictory, complex, and unduly restrictive in practice, and it can be ad hoc and dif®cult to implement as a computer application. The performance-based approach directly models the actual possible behaviors of an artifact (in this case, wheelchair motion) that are related to the functional intent of the designed system (a building) and (hopefully) to the speci®cation of a prescriptive building code. This paper presents example cases from architectural practice to illustrate the use of robot motion-planning techniques for wheelchair accessibility analysis. This application is an example of using modern computational methods in support of knowledge-intensive engineering. The simulation method has broad applicability within engineering design. We illustrate and discuss how to analyze virtual simulations of the detailed behavior of a designed artifact in order to assess its use by intended users. q 2001 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.Keywords: Motion planning; Disabled access; Wheelchair accessibility; Performance-based analysis IntroductionThis paper develops a method to determine if a usable wheelchair accessible route in a facility exists using computer-based motion-planning techniques. One concern for designing a facility is the extent to which it satis®es a set of usability objectives. In the US, wheelchair access in private facilities is often an important objective, and certain wheelchair accessibility is a constraint that is mandated by law for most public facilities. The Americans with Disabilities Act Accessibility Guidelines (ADAAG) contaiǹ prescriptive' speci®cations for determining the existence of a valid wheelchair accessible route as well as other objectives for disabled access Advantages of using prescriptive provisions include straightforward evaluation of a design using the prescribed parameters, and such evaluation often does not need highlevel engineering knowledge about the speci®c analysis. However, prescriptive-based codes can be ambiguous, contradictory, complex, and restrictive [6]. Solutions constrained by prescriptive-based codes such as the ADAAG address only a fraction of the possible solutions that meet the design intent or objectives of these codes. Since it often is implicit, it is often dif®cult for both designers and code checkers to discern the design intent and objectives of a building code or code provision. However, in the case of the ADAAG, the intent is clearly stated as ª¼scoping and technical requirements for accessibility to buildings and facilities by individ...
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