The Influence of National Culture on Evacuation Response Behaviour and Time: An Agent-Based Approach

“How does culture, in combination with cues, settings and affiliation, influence response-phase behaviour and time and total evacuation time?”. A questionnaire and an agent-based model for a case study of a library evacuation in Czech Republic, Poland, Turkey and the UK have been developed to answer this question. Our questionnaire, conducted...

Safety barrier performance assessment by integrating computational fluid dynamics and evacuation modeling for toxic gas leakage scenarios

Toxic gas leakage represents a type of major process accident scenario threatening human life. Technical and non-technical safety barriers are employed to prevent toxic gas leakage accidents or mitigate the possible catastrophic consequences. Evacuation must be executed in severe toxic gas release scenarios. The performance assessment of...

Determining effective evacuation strategies based on WiFi data in Buildings: An exploratory data-driven and agent-based evacuation modeling approach

Evacuation strategies are critical in preventing casualties during emergency evacuations in buildings. As large-scale gatherings and high crowd densities in buildings occur more often, the need of relevant and effective evacuation strategies emerges. However, the domain of research that tries to identify possible ways to improve evacuation, i.e....

Decision-making on pre-disaster evacuation strategies in danger of cyclone induced floods: Two case studies in Mozambique showing how to balance timeliness and uncertainty reduction in making shelter location decisions

As Needham (2015) concluded based on researching 700 storm surge events: “tropical cyclone induced floods are among the world’s deadliest and destructive natural hazards”. Due to this growing threat, there is a growing need for evacuation policies in case of an impending cyclone, in order to reduce the negative effects of a cyclone. The...

Evacuation in flood threat scenarios: Improving methods to estimate the required time for evacuation.

Evacuation is a tool to minimise the loss of life and economic damages in flood (threat) scenarios. There is currently little data available on mass evacuation in the Netherlands to calibrate existing models or to develop new insights. This thesis aims to improve the methods used in the Netherlands to estimate the effectiveness of evacuation...

Behavioural analysis and modelling of family gathering during the 2011 Tohoku tsunami evacuation

The conventional evacuation modelling assumes that that family members are to be together in the face of tsunamis and evacuate as a household or each person evacuate individually. This assumption, however, can cause an inaccurate prediction when taking family gathering behaviour into account, which was reported to have occurred during the 2011...

New approaches to evacuation modelling for fire safety engineering applications

This paper presents the findings of the workshop “New approaches to evacuation modelling”, which took place on the 11th of June 2017 in Lund (Sweden)within the Symposium of the International Association for Fire Safety Science (IAFSS). The workshop gathered international experts in the field of fire evacuation modelling from 19 different...

Safe Haven: providing a high ground when water rises

The water tax in the Netherlands provides the funding for all the water management in the Dutch deltas. In the US there is no such tax, this means funding big civil projects may be problematic and not so easy. Therefore it is necessary to explore smaller scale solutions for the problem of sea level rise. <br/>In the San Francisco bay area, there...

Analysis of evacuation performance of early stage ship designs using a Markov-Decision-Process model

This thesis research is conducted on behalf of the Delft University of Technology and Bureau Veritas Rotterdam BV, and the goal is to improve ship evacuation by analyzing this aspect early on in the design process. First, this summary will provide a background on the difficulties involved with the ship evacuation process . Next, an explanation...

Multimodal Transportation Simulation for Emergencies using the Link Transmission Model

Emergencies disrupting urban transportation systems cause management problems for authorities. This thesis develops simulation methods that permit analysis thereof and evaluation of candidate management plans, tested in three case studies. It formulates a methodological framework using agent-based choice models and multimodal macroscopic dynamic...

A general activity-based methodology for simulating multimodal transportation networks during emergencies

Many possible emergency conditions, including evacuations, negatively affect the urban transportation system by substantially increasing the travel demand and/or reducing the supplied capacity. A transportation model can be used to quantify and understand the impact of the underlying disasters and corresponding management strategies. To this end...

A General Activity-based Methodology for Simulating Multimodal Transportation Networks during Emergencies

Paper + lecture. Many possible emergency conditions, including evacuations, negatively affect the urban transportation system by substantially increasing the travel demand and/or reducing the supplied capacity. We develop a new, general and efficient methodology suitable for simulating multimodal transportation systems subject to a wide range of...

Evacuation modeling including traveler information and compliance behavior

Traffic simulation models are often used to support decisions when planning an evacuation. Scenario analyses based on these models then typically focus on traffic dynamics and the effect of traffic control measures in order to locate possible bottlenecks and predict evacuation times. A clear approach to incorporate traveler information and...

Evacuation and traffic management

The report provides a summary of the work that has been carried out in Task 17 under Theme 2 of the EC research project FLOODsite that focused on evacuation modelling and traffic management related to flood events. When flooding of populated areas occurs or is likely a management system for the road network in and around the flood prone areas is...