Agent-Based Simulation of Building Evacuation after an Earthquake: Coupling Human Behavior with Structural Response

Abstract

The safety of building occupants during and immediately after disasters, such as a major earthquake, is highly dependent on the way in which people interact with the damaged physical environment. While there are extensive studies on evacuation from undamaged structures and on structural behavior under seismic and other hazards, research on the influence of building damage on human evacuation behavior is limited. This study presents a framework by which models for buildings and human behavior can be coupled to analyze the dynamic influences of building damage on the evacuation process. The framework combines nonlinear dynamic finite-element modeling of structures, probabilistic modeling of damage, and agent-based modeling of human occupants to investigate the behavior of people as they interact with each other and with their dynamically-deteriorating environment as they attempt to evacuate the building. A case study is presented for a typical three-story commercial office building subjected to the ground motions of the 1994 Northridge, California earthquake. By using exit flow rates and other measures related to evacuation time histories as the outcomes of interest, it is shown how the proposed framework can be used as a tool to enhance building design and to develop recommendations for improved evacuation strategies. An important future extension of the work is expanding the framework for multiple buildings for community-wide models of postdisaster behavior

Prototyping virtual reality serious games for building earthquake preparedness: The Auckland City Hospital case study

“…Then, the damage to the non-structural elements and the systems can be predicted by using fragility functions, which are relationships between the probability of failure of a non-structural element and the damage to the structural elements. This approach has already been used to predict the impact of an earthquake on building evacuation using different evacuation simulation approaches [53,54]. The main limitation of the quantitative approach is that it requires advanced calculations as well as many pieces of information such as the structural and non-structural building components, earthquake location and magnitude, ground motion conditions, etc.…”

Evolutionary Game of Emergency Evacuation After an Earthquake at a University: How to Promote Orderly Evacuation

“…Evacuees may exhibit a dependence on other evacuees around them after earthquakes [44]; for example, people want to evacuate with their friends and relatives [7,16]. Psychological affinity can turn an evacuation crowd from individual evacuations to a group evacuation [17,18,44].…”

“…There are delays for some evacuees before evacuation [17] because of group-oriented [18] and returning behaviors, taking emergency shelter, exit-selection or hesitation (as observed in videos on websites). Evacuation delays for various kinds of evacuees differ [6,7,9,10,16,17,45].…”

“…The settings and the ranges of parameters are detailed in Appendix A. As for pedestrians who show group-oriented behaviors, we followed the research by [18]: when agents i and j form a group, they will essentially act as one agent with a larger body size, and they are assumed to move at half of agent i's normal walking speed. Therefore, we assumed that group-oriented behaviors were only exhibited by students who are impulsive evacuees because of group-oriented students' increased evacuation delays and body energies compared to a single student.…”

“…Bernardini et al distinguished behaviors common to other types of evacuations and behaviors specific to earthquake evacuation [17]. Liu et al further presented a framework for not only considering human behaviors but also taking building damage and population into account to analyze the dynamic influences on the evacuation process [18].…”