572 research outputs found
Applying the lessons of the attack on the World Trade Center, 11th September 2001, to the design and use of interactive evacuation simulations
The collapse of buildings, such as terminal 2E at Paris' Charles de Gaule Airport, and of fires, such as the Rhode Island, Station Night Club tragedy, has focused public attention on the safety of large public buildings. Initiatives in the United States and in Europe have led to the development of interactive simulators that model evacuation from these buildings. The tools avoid some of the ethical and legal problems from simulating evacuations; many people were injured during the 1993 evacuation of the World Trade Center (WTC) complex. They also use many concepts that originate within the CHI communities. For instance, some simulators use simple task models to represent the occupants' goal structures as they search for an available exit. However, the recent release of the report from the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks upon the United States (the '9/11 commission') has posed serious questions about the design and use of this particular class of interactive systems. This paper argues that simulation research needs to draw on insights from the CHI communities in order to meet some the challenges identified by the 9/11 commission
Lessons from the evacuation of the World Trade Center, Sept 11th 2001 for the future development of computer simulations
This paper provides an overview of the state of the art in evacuation simulations. These interactive computer based tools have been developed to help the owners and designers of large public buildings to assess the risks that occupants might face during emergency egress. The development of the Glasgow Evacuation Simulator is used to illustrate the existing generation of tools. This system uses Monte Carlo techniques to control individual and group movements during an evacuation. The end-user can interactively open and block emergency exits at any point. It is also possible to alter the priorities that individuals associate with particular exit routes. A final benefit is that the tool can derive evacuation simulations directly from existing architects models; this reduces the cost of simulations and creates a more prominent role for these tools in the iterative development of large-scale public buildings. Empirical studies have been used to validate the GES system as a tool to support evacuation training. The development of these tools has been informed by numerous human factors studies and by recent accident investigations. For example, the 2003 fire in the Station nightclub in Rhode Island illustrated the way in which most building occupants retrace their steps to an entrance even when there are alternate fire exits. The second half of this paper uses this introduction to criticise the existing state of the art in evacuation simulations. These criticisms are based on a detailed study of the recent findings from the 9/11 Commission (2004). Ten different lessons are identified. Some relate to the need to better understand the role of building management and security systems in controlling egress from public buildings. Others relate to the human factors involved in coordinating distributed groups of emergency personnel who may be physically exhausted by the demands of an evacuation. Arguably the most important findings centre on the need to model the ingress and egress of emergency personnel from these structures. The previous focus of nearly all-existing simulation tools has been on the evacuation of building occupants rather than on the safety of first responders1
Modelo de estratégia e coordenação genérico para sistemas multi-agente
Estágio realizado na Universidade de Aveiro e orientado pelo Prof. Doutor Jose Nuno Panelas Nunes LauTese de mestrado integrado. Engenharia Electrotécnica e de Computadores. Faculdade de Engenharia. Universidade do Porto. 200
e-Sanctuary: open multi-physics framework for modelling wildfire urban evacuation
The number of evacuees worldwide during wildfire keep rising, year after year. Fire evacuations at the wildland-urban interfaces (WUI) pose a serious challenge to fire and emergency services and are a global issue affecting thousands of communities around the world. But to date, there is a lack of comprehensive tools able to inform, train or aid the evacuation response and the decision making in case of wildfire. The present work describes a novel framework for modelling wildfire urban evacuations. The framework is based on multi-physics simulations that can quantify the evacuation performance. The work argues that an integrated approached requires considering and integrating all three important components of WUI evacuation, namely: fire spread, pedestrian movement, and traffic movement. The report includes a systematic review of each model component, and the key features needed for the integration into a comprehensive toolkit
AFRANCI : multi-layer architecture for cognitive agents
Tese de doutoramento. Engenharia Electrotécnica e de Computadores. Faculdade de Engenharia. Universidade do Porto. 201
Improving Fire Emergency Management Using Occupant Information and BIM-Based Simulation
The increasing complexity of buildings has brought some difficulties for emergency response. When fires occur in a building, limited perception regarding the disaster area and occupants can increase the probability of injuries and damages. Thus, the availability of comprehensive and timely information may help understand the existing conditions and plan an efficient evacuation. For this purpose, Building Information Modeling (BIM) should be integrated with three sets of information: (1) occupancy that defines the type of space usage; (2) occupants’ information; and (3) sensory data. The Industry Foundation Classes (IFC), as a standard of BIM, has the definitions for all areas, volumes, and elements of a building. IFC also has the basic definitions of sensor and occupant entities. However, these entities do not provide enough dynamic and accurate information for supporting emergency management systems.
In addition, building renovation projects have an effect on evacuation time. During the building renovation projects, space is shared between the construction crews and occupants. The construction works change the building layout and movement flow, which increase the occupants’ vulnerability, affecting their evacuation behavior under emergency conditions. Hence, the safety and wellbeing of the occupants as well as their evacuation time should be considered under emergency incidents.
This thesis aims to improve fire emergency management using occupant information and BIM-based simulation. For this purpose, a “dynamic BIM” for fire emergency real-time management is developed that captures enough dynamism regarding the building condition as well as environmental conditions and occupants’ behavior. Also, an Agent-Based Model (ABM) is used to assist in the analysis of the static and dynamic behavior of the environment and occupants in BIM.
The specific objectives of the research are: (1) extending IfcSensor entity for occupant’s sensors; (2) adding new attributes to IfcOccupant to support emergency response operations and defining a new entity for occupancy; (3) defining the relationships between sensors, occupants, occupancy, time series, and building components in the context of building evacuation; (4) creating dynamic BIM for tracking occupants and environmental states; and (5) evaluating the evacuation time for specific scenarios where additional spatio-temporal constraints exist during a fire incidence. Renovation construction operations are considered as such constraint and an ABM co-simulation framework is developed under emergency conditions. The feasibility of the proposed methods is discussed using different case studies
University of Southern California Heritage Hall- Fire Protection and Life Safety Analysis
This fire protection and life safety analysis is submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the Master of Science Degree from California Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo. The study was performed on the University of Southern California’s Heritage Hall, which includes both a code-determined prescriptive examination and a performance-based analysis. The purpose of this review is to evaluate the Heritage Hall address based on compliance with all applicable codes and standards, as well as the determined occupant tenability criteria. The prescriptive examination of Heritage Hall consisted of the evaluation of all structural fire protection, egress analysis and design, water-based fire suppression, and fire alarm systems. This analysis was primarily performed by utilizing the 2013 edition of California Building Code and the 2013 editions of all applicable NFPA codes and standards. The structural fire protection overview provided an in-depth prescriptive analysis of the conversions made for Heritage Hall during the 2012 renovation project. The latest recapitalization expanded the lower level and added more spaces for student athletes, thus converting those locations to the A-3 occupancy classification. Per CBC Table 601, non-bearing walls and partitions were not required to be fire-rated. The structural update complied with all updated building codes due to a water curtain installed per Section 404.6 of the CBC, which allowed the center museum’s atrium not to be separated by a 1-hour fire barrier. Instead, both glass walls surrounding the atrium were used to create smoke partitions to meet standards. The egress analysis and design was utilized to determine new occupant loads for each floor, remove the B-2 occupancy classification, the creation of a new area of refuge. Per CBC Table 1018.1, corridor walls and ceilings were not required to be fire resistance rated due to the building being fully sprinklered. Only the area of refuge at the lower level was provided with a 1-hour fire rated separation, and existing 1-hour separations, such as the lower level’s exit access corridor, remained intact. Using the Life Safety Code, a building evacuation analysis was performed at Heritage Hall’s lower level. The average evacuation time of all lower level occupants was determined to be 5.43 minutes, with a range of 2.74-8.13 minutes depending on whether occupants used the exit corridor or the stairways. All egress components and occupancy classification were deemed acceptable. The water-based suppression analysis was performed by primarily using NFPA 13 and NFPA 25 codes and standards. A complete analysis of the building’s risers, sprinklers, and system demand calculations provided acceptable criteria for the water-based fire protection system installed. The outside overhang was chosen not to have sprinklers installed due to the large amount of remaining asbestos at the interstitial level near the ceiling. The overhang is made of concrete and directly exposed to the outside. The building’s fire alarm system was installed in 2012, with all new fire detection devices, notification appliances, fire alarm control panel, and a mass notification system. The fire alarm system design was analyzed using NFPA 72, with all spacing and location requirements deemed acceptable for the devices installed. All spot-type smoke and heat detectors are ceiling-mounted in accordance with the open ceiling plan at the lower level, which contains both ceiling and wall-mounted sprinklers.
The performance-based analysis was performed using Fire Dynamics Simulator (FDS), a fire modeling program provided by NIST, and the SFPE Handbook of Fire Protection Engineering. Two unique design fire performance scenarios were established for Heritage Hall: a workstation fire in the first floor atrium and a stacked-chairs fire near the lower level exit corridor that prevents its use. In order to establish a basis for analysis and comparison, various tenability criteria were determined for the building’s occupants. The performance criteria consisted of visibility, toxicity, and tenability requirements for the facility, which were compared with modeling simulations created using FDS. The simulations allowed for the determination of the available safe egress time (ASET). Occupant behavior and characteristics were paired with Thunderhead Engineering’s Pathfinder program to provide a required set egress time (RSET) for each fire scenario. While the lower level corridor fire scenario met all tenability requirements, the atrium’s fire scenario simulation did not provide an acceptable ASET, and therefore did not pass the critical occupant visibility requirements for safe evacuation. Recommendations were provided to establish a legitimate smoke barrier per CBC Section 404.6, or an appropriate door separation for each side entrance to the atrium per CBC Section 715.1
Swarming Reconnaissance Using Unmanned Aerial Vehicles in a Parallel Discrete Event Simulation
Current military affairs indicate that future military warfare requires safer, more accurate, and more fault-tolerant weapons systems. Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAV) are one answer to this military requirement. Technology in the UAV arena is moving toward smaller and more capable systems and is becoming available at a fraction of the cost. Exploiting the advances in these miniaturized flying vehicles is the aim of this research. How are the UAVs employed for the future military? The concept of operations for a micro-UAV system is adopted from nature from the appearance of flocking birds, movement of a school of fish, and swarming bees among others. All of these natural phenomena have a common thread: a global action resulting from many small individual actions. This emergent behavior is the aggregate result of many simple interactions occurring within the flock, school, or swarm. In a similar manner, a more robust weapon system uses emergent behavior resulting in no weakest link because the system itself is made up of simple interactions by hundreds or thousands of homogeneous UAVs. The global system in this research is referred to as a swarm. Losing one or a few individual unmanned vehicles would not dramatically impact the swarms ability to complete the mission or cause harm to any human operator. Swarming reconnaissance is the emergent behavior of swarms to perform a reconnaissance operation. An in-depth look at the design of a reconnaissance swarming mission is studied. A taxonomy of passive reconnaissance applications is developed to address feasibility. Evaluation of algorithms for swarm movement, communication, sensor input/analysis, targeting, and network topology result in priorities of each model\u27s desired features. After a thorough selection process of available implementations, a subset of those models are integrated and built upon resulting in a simulation that explores the innovations of swarming UAVs
Research and technology 1991 annual report
As the NASA Center responsible for assembly, checkout, servicing, launch, recovery, and operational support of Space Transportation System elements and payloads, NASA Kennedy is placing increasing emphasis on the center's research and technology program. In addition to strengthening those areas of engineering and operations technology that contribute to safer, more efficient, and more economical execution of the current mission, the technical tools are being developed which are needed to execute the center's mission relative to future programs. The Engineering Development Directorate encompasses most of the labs and other center resources that are key elements of research and technology program implementation and is responsible for implementation of the majority of the projects in this Kennedy Space Center 1991 annual report
Modelling of a rope-free passenger transportation system for active cabin vibration damping
Conventional vertical passenger transportation is performed by lifts. Conventional traction-drive electrical lifts use ropes to transfer the rotational motion of an electrical motor into a vertical motion of the cabin. The vertical passenger transportation system discussed in this paper does not use any ropes, the motor directly provides a driving force, which moves the cabin. This new propulsion is realized through an electrical linear motor. The use of the linear motor requires a new design of the passenger transportation system (PTS), which includes reducing the weight of the car through lightweight construction. The reduced stiffness of the lightweight design renders the construction more vulnerable to vibrations. In order to improve ride quality of the transportation system it is necessary to develop new concepts to damp the vibrations. One way to increase stiffness characteristics of the system is to introduce active damping components to be used alongside passive damping components. It is essential to derive a dynamic model of the system in order to design and also later control these damping components in the best possible way. This paper describes the fundamental steps undertaken to derive a dynamic model for designing and controlling active damping components for the new type of vertical PTS. The model is derived as a Multi-Body System (MBS), where the connections between the bodies are modelled as spring damper elements. The derivation of the MBS is demonstrated on a transportation system, consisting of three main components: a sledge, holding the rotor of the linear motor; a mounting frame, which is used to provide support for the cabin; and the actual cabin. The modelling of the propulsion system, thus the electrical part of the PTS, will not be the focus of this work
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