Incorporating Social Behaviors in Egress Simulation

Abstract

Emergency evacuation (egress) is considered one of the most important issues in the design of buildings and public facilities. Given the complexity and variability in an evacuation situation, computational simulation tool is often used to help assess the performance of an egress design. Studies have revealed that social behaviors can have significant influence on the evacuating crowd during an emergency. Among the challenges in designing safe egress thus include identifying the social behaviors and incorporating them in the design analysis. Even though many egress simulation tools now exist, realistic human and social behaviors commonly observed in emergency situations are not supported. This paper describes an egress simulation approach that incorporates research results from social science regarding human and social behaviors observed in emergency situations. By integrating the behavioral theories proposed by social scientists, the simulation tool can potentially produce more realistic predications than current tools which heavily rely on simplified and, in most cases, mathematical assumptions.

Cooperative survival principles for underground flooding: Vitae System based multi-agent simulation

“…Another example is ESCAPES, which has the capability to analyze different agent types, emotional interactions, informational interactions, and behavioral interactions (Tsai et al, 2011). Moreover, Chu and colleagues have developed a model called Social Agent for Egress (SAFEgress) for considering four agent behavioral modules: following familiar exits, following cues from building features, navigating with social groups, and following crowds (Chu, Pan, & Law, 2011;Chu, Parigi, Latombe, & Law, 2014. Finally, Pax and Pavon (2017) have constructed a crowd simulation model, named MASSIS, to simultaneously improve scalability and complexity of an agent model.…”

Pedestrian dynamics with explicit sharing of exit choice during egress through a long corridor

“…On other hand, Pan et.al. [35,36,37,38] attempted to build a simulation system that takes social interaction among individual nodes through simulated perception of current environment and a set of rules/decision tree to come up with a valid action for each set of sensed input. This work combines both motion and interaction model albeit the interaction among crowd is still implicit and there is no direct interaction/sharing of exit choice opinion among the nodes.…”

Modelling social identification and helping in evacuation simulation

“…On the other hand, there are a number of publications on pedestrian motion models which incorporate social and psychological behaviour (Pan et al, 2007;Chu et al, 2011;Tsai et al, 2011;Chu and Law, 2013). Yet, these publications mostly describe computer frameworks designed to incorporate many possible but as yet unspecified behavioural models.…”