PEDESTRIAN AND EVACUATION DYNAMICS 2003

 PROCEEDINGS OF THE 2nd INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE ON PEDESTRIAN AND EVACUATION DYNAMICS

GREENWICH, UK 20-22 AUGUST 2003

  

Edited by

 

Edwin R. Galea

Director Fire Safety Engineering Group

University of Greenwich

London, UK

 

 

 

PREFACE

 

 

The world is changing.  From shopping malls to transport terminals, aircraft to passenger ships, the infrastructure of society is having to cope with ever more intense and complex flows of people.  Today, more than ever, safety, efficiency and comfort are issues that must be addressed by all designers. The World Trade Centre disaster brought into tragic focus the need for well-designed evacuation systems.  The new regulatory framework (MSC/Circ 1033), in the marine industry, acknowledges not only the importance of ensuring that the built environment is safe, but also the central role that evacuation simulation can play in achieving this. 

 

An additional need is to design spaces for efficiency – ensuring that maximum throughput can be achieved during normal operations – and comfort – ensuring that the resulting flows offer little opportunity for needless queuing or excessive congestion.  These complex demands challenge traditional prescriptive design guides and regulations. Designers and regulators are consequently turning to performance-based analysis and regulations facilitated by the new generation of people movement models.

 

The evolution of these models reflects our appreciation and understanding of the central role human behaviour has on pedestrian and evacuation dynamics.  In this context, human behaviour has grown to encompass, not simply the movement mechanics of people, but also the factors that motivate us to move, shape the strategies we develop to move through complex environments, or influence our ability to cope with a rapidly changing environment and to expedite egress.  These factors can be shaped by sociological, psychological and physiological influences.  Clearly then, an understanding of human behaviour is key to both the development of pedestrian and evacuation simulation models and the meaningful application of those tools to shape the modern world.  

 

With our increasing appreciation and knowledge of the central role that human behaviour has on pedestrian and evacuation dynamics, these models have evolved over the past 20 years, from the first generation ‘hydraulic’ models –  which treated thinking humans as a fluid flowing through pipes – and second generation ‘ball-bearing’ models – in which individual mindless automata bounced around the confines of the geometry – to the current generation of behavioural models with adaptive capabilities.  As witnessed by the range of complex human behaviour represented in the models described within the pages of this book, today’s pedestrian and evacuation models attempt to represent realistic human behaviour as diverse as reaction to smoke, individual structural knowledge, reaction to communication, reaction to signage, affiliative behaviour, occupant motivation, and queue recommitment behaviour.  A recent survey conducted by the Fire Safety Engineering Group (FSEG) of the University of Greenwich suggests that over 40 different evacuation models for aircraft, buildings, trains and ships are currently used by engineers worldwide and many more are in various stages of development.  Of these, no fewer than 20 different pedestrian and evacuation models were described by their developers and users at the conference.

 

But while many advances have been made in the development of pedestrian and evacuation models over the past 20 years, there is still much to be achieved.  As the behavioural capabilities of our models increase – driven by the need to satisfy the increasingly sophisticated demands made by design engineers and enforcement agencies – we find our fundamental understanding of the sociological and psychological components of pedestrian and evacuation behaviour is left wanting.  Much fundamental human performance data under both emergency and non-emergency conditions is yet to be collected.  In many cases, this lack of fundamental data leads model developers to ‘smooth over the cracks’ with a variety of assumptions, primarily based on ‘expert opinion’.  Even the fundamental algorithms we use to simulate the movement and behaviour of people are being re-examined in order to achieve greater computational efficiencies. 

 

But for all the challenges, modelling capabilities continue to advance at phenomenal speed.  Even three years ago it may have been considered a challenge to perform a design analysis involving the evacuation of 30,000 people from a 110 story building, but with today’s sophisticated modelling tools and high-end PCs, this is now possible.  Today’s challenges are much more ambitious and involve simulating the movement and behaviour of over one million people in city-sized geometries. 

 

This conference brought together over 80 researchers, design engineers and regulators from 12 countries to address these and other issues.  The 34 papers presented cover a variety of topics including:

 

-         The modelling of pedestrian dynamics and its applications.

-        Building evacuation model development, validation, application and the regulatory environment.

-         Marine evacuation model development, validation, application and the regulatory environment.

-         Data collection relating to human performance in emergency and non-emergency situations.

 

As such, the conference represents a unique opportunity for experts and beginners, model developers and model users, regulators and design engineers, to gain insight into the rapidly changing world of computer simulation of evacuation and circulation dynamics.

 

I would like to acknowledge the support of the following organisations for their generous contributions: our main sponsors, Lloyd’s Register and the University of Greenwich; and our other sponsors, Space Syntax, the Institution of Fire Engineers, the Institute of Mathematics and its Applications and the International Association of Fire Safety Science. 

 

Finally, I would like to thank everyone who has helped make this conference a reality and a success: Professor Michael Schreckenberg of Universität Duisburg-Essen, Duisburg, who was the organiser of the first conference and who provided valuable advice; my personal secretary and conference secretary, Mrs Françoise Barkshire, whose formidable organisational skills and personal calm were of great reassurance to me; the programme committee, who assisted me in refereeing the papers - my FSEG colleagues, Dr Peter Lawrence and Dr Steve Gwynne; Dr Wendy Saunders, Dept of Psychology, Victoria University, Australia and Professor Michael Schreckenberg – and last but by no means least, the staff and research students of FSEG and the technical staff of the School of Computing and Mathematical Sciences of the University of Greenwich, who made certain that everything ran smoothly over the three days of the conference.

 

Greenwich, August 2003

Professor Ed Galea Director Fire Safety Engineering Group University of Greenwich