Modeling an ontology on accessible evacuation routes for emergencies

Providing alert communication in emergency situations is vital to reduce the number of victims. However, this is a challenging goal for researchers and professionals due to the diverse pool of prospective users, e.g. people with disabilities as well as other vulnerable groups. Moreover, in the event of an emergency situation, many people could become vulnerable because of exceptional circumstances such as stress, an unknown environment or even visual impairment (e.g. fire causing smoke). Within this scope, a crucial activity is to notify affected people about safe places and available evacuation routes. In order to address this need, we propose to extend an ontology, called SEMA4A (Simple EMergency Alert 4 [for] All), developed in a previous work for managing knowledge about accessibility guidelines, emergency situations and communication technologies. In this paper, we introduce a semi-automatic technique for knowledge acquisition and modeling on accessible evacuation routes. We introduce a use case to show applications of the ontology and conclude with an evaluation involving several experts in evacuation procedures. © 2014 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved

Safe and Inclusive Public Spaces

3noThe paper covers the basic research carried out at the Universities of Trieste, Udine and Venice in the field of safety in use, use and enjoyment of public spaces, which are characterized by a multi scale and trans-disciplinary approach, exceeding the vision of solutions given by regulations and based on the concept of “standard user”. This approach does not overlook the dimension of man's desire to benefit from all the potential that a give context would be able to provide to "enable” him to use spaces, goods and services safely and with the highest possible autonomy, benefiting while doing it. These search paths, developed at national and international level, focus on the role played by the project to improve the degree of accessibility of spaces and assets for public use, thereby contributing to the processes of social inclusion and empowerment of communities for a sustainable transformation of the habitat.reservedmixedGarofolo Ilaria, Conti Christina, Tatano ValeriaGarofolo, Ilaria; Conti, Christina; Tatano, Valeri

The Evacuation Simulation of Wheelchair Users in a Building Fire: An Initial Dynamic Characterization of Structural Egress Components

People with disabilities are one of the most vulnerable groups involved in building fires. According to the U.S. Fire Administration, in the United States alone, an estimated 700 home fires involve people with physical disabilities each year while over 1700 involve those with mental health disorders. Despite this, the current body of literature shows few studies focused on the evacuation of disabled people. This is a direct result of past and present social injustice on people with disabilities and has resulted in high injury and death rates during fires. To combat this, enrich the literature, and improve their experiences in the built environment, this thesis marks the inaugural study of an ongoing project that aims to include all forms of disability in building fire research. This is initiated through the identification of four general disability categories involved in evacuation: functional independence, sensory perception, medical health, and social cognition. By far the most abundant category, functional independence (physical disabilities) provides a starting point for future reference. Therefore, this thesis experiment involves the simulation of 1-3 wheelchair users in a building population of 80 occupants. Two iterations of simulations were completed for a low-rise university apartment building using the evacuation software Pathfinder, and the resulting 327 simulations were analyzed for potential structural aids and barriers to the evacuation process. As a byproduct of this research, a dynamic structural ranking system of egress components is proposed for wheelchair users. Overall, the goal of this research is to provide a connection between people with disabilities and engineers and officials in the structural fire field—therefore increasing awareness among the non-disabled community and improving access and egress in the built environment. Additionally, suggestions for structural modifications are provided to improve egressibility of the simulated building. Finally, the limitations and challenges of the research are identified, and plans for future research are provided

Egressibility : Applying the concept of accessibility to the self-evacuation of people with functional limitations

The population is getting increasingly older, and old age is correlated with decreased functional capacity. In society, continuous improvements in accessibility of public environments is apparent. Together, these two factors contribute to the trend that the people that are expected to perform self-evacuation today are more diverse in abilities than ever. Functional capacity refers to the abilities to perform fundamental everyday activities such as seeing, hearing, moving around, etc., while a decrease in functional capacity is referred to as a functional limitation. In the field of accessibility, definitions have been developed to reflect the person-environment interactions that determine whether an environment is accessible or not. That is, accessibility can be investigated by assessing the interaction between the environmental demands and a person’s functional capacity. The focus of this thesis has been the concept of egressibility, here defined as “accessibility to means of evacuation”. The purpose has been to explore ways of identifying issues related to self-evacuation possibilities for people with functional limitations based on the notion of accessibility. This was achieved through two research studies including conceptual and methodological exploration on the topic. The first study was a qualitative interview study to investigate the perspectives on egressibility from older people with functional limitations in Sweden. The second study focused on a methodology implemented into an instrument to measure egressibility by juxtaposing environmental demands and functional limitations. The results from the qualitative study showed that older people may tend to favour self-reliance in mitigating egressibility issues, instead of relying on the physical and social environment to be supportive. The instrument developed in the second study, called the Egress Enabler, displayed promising attributes of validity and reliability during initial testing. However, the Egress Enabler is affected by the current lack of scientific knowledge regarding several aspects on the interaction between environmental demands and functional capacity during egress. Some of these knowledge gaps have already been identified and should be further investigated. The Egress Enabler represents a necessary step towards a comprehensive performance-based evaluation of self-evacuation possibilities for people with functional limitations, highlighting the complex interaction between evacuation and accessibility

Evacuation Modelling of Mixed-Ability Populations in Fire Emergencies

UK statistics have shown that a significant percentage of fatalities in fires have suffered from some kind of disability. In this context 'disability' relates to a person's physical or mental condition that impinges on their ability to react and move promptly in an emergency. Various evacuation modelling techniques are being adopted to study the movement of occupants during emergencies since the exposure of people to fires for experimental purposes is unethical. However, many evacuation models have ignored the effects of disability on escape potential and therefore tend to predict optimal evacuation times. Moreover, whilst providing some valuable insights into certain factors affecting occupant movement, current models are generally presented in isolation and fail to define a general framework for designing solutions to fire safety engineering problems. The purpose of this research programme was to develop a more general methodology for predicting evacuation times of mixed-ability populations. This was made possible through the development and use of a novel concept of evacuation peiformance index (EPI), which is the relative ease of evacuating a disabled person compared to an able-bodied person, founded on a consideration of the effects of disabilities and mobility aids on evacuation times. The author shows how this concept relates three aspects of fire safety, namely, individual characteristics of disabled occupants, the amount of assistance they require, and building design and environmental factors. She contends that the evacuation peifornzance index of a class of individuals is primarily dependent on these three categories. Experimental data to verify the above claim was collected from careflully monitored evacuation drills involving a group of disabled people. Their EPIs were determined along a pre-defined route from which their evacuation times were calculated. Comparisons between predicted times using the EPI concept and measured times from alternative empirical data were seen to be in reasonable agreement. An iterative design procedure is also suggested; one that is capable of predicting worst possible evacuation times by incorporating measures of EPI and escape route dimensions and details. The EPI concept provides fire safety engineering with a logical design philosophy, which is flexible and easily comprehensible. It endeavours to increase understanding of evacuation of disabled people, and provide a simplified mechanism for fire safety design and planning of evacuation procedures

People with disabilities and disasters

Investigations have collectively established that disasters affect people with disabilities both disproportionately and negatively. Relevant research is reviewed by academic genesis areas in this chapter, namely; 1) disaster-focused research, 2) mental health, 3) epidemiology and public health, and 4) disability studies. However, research emanating from these disciplines reflects different epistemological assumptions about disability as well as varying knowledge about disability as a social and cultural construct. As such, this fragmented research has yet to coalesce into a coherent theory of how disasters affect people with disabilities. Scholars from the field of disability studies note that perceived disability status is often associated with stigma, creating a separate and unique barrier across societies and cultures, which can augment disaster vulnerability. An important element in reforming practice is ensuring people with disabilities can be active participants in their own preparedness, disaster risk reduction, disaster response, and disaster recovery

Building Egressibility in an Ageing Society

This is the final report of a three-year project called Building Egressibility in an Ageing Society, sponsored by the Swedish research council for sustainable development (FORMAS). While accessibility is an established and widely used concept in building design, the evacuation of people with functional limitations is still at a stage in which several research gaps exist. In this context, this work discusses the concept of Egressibility, intended as the accessibility to means of evacuation. A categorization of populations with functional limitations in light of their egress-related abilities was performed by reviewing egress and accessibility research. The role of functional limitations on evacuation performance was investigated using the International Classification of Functioning, Disability and Health (ICF). A qualitative interview study consisting of 28 semi-structured interviews with people with functional limitations was conducted to further scrutinize Egressibility issues of older people. An Egressibility assessment instrument, the Egress Enabler, has been developed based on the concept of person-environment fit. A Virtual Reality (VR) experiment involving 40 participants was also conducted to demonstrate the use of VR technology to study the impact of people with functional limitations on egress. It also allowed to explore how the presence of people with functional limitations affects exit choice. Overall, Egressibility was investigated with the aim to ensure that egress planning and procedures are designed to equally consider all members of an aging society

Engineering egress data considering pedestrians with reduced mobility

To quantify the evacuation process, evacuation practitioners use engineering egressdata describing the occupant movement characteristics. These data are typicallybased to young and fit populations. However, the movement abilities of occupantswho might be involved in evacuations are becoming more variable—with the buildingpopulations of today typically including increasing numbers of individuals: withimpairments or who are otherwise elderly or generally less mobile. Thus, there willbe an increasing proportion of building occupants with reduced ability to egress. Forsafe evacuation, there is therefore a need to provide valid engineering egress dataconsidering pedestrians with disabilities. Gwynne and Boyce recently compiled aseries of data sets related to the evacuation process to support practitioner activitiesin the chapter Engineering Data in the SFPE Handbook of Fire Protection Engineering.This paper supplements these data sets by providing information on and presentingdata obtained from additional research related to the premovement and horizontalmovement of participants with physical-, cognitive-, or age-related disabilities. Theaim is to provide an overview of currently available data sets related to, and keyfactors affecting the egress performance of, mixed ability populations which could beused to guide fire safety engineering decisions in the context of building design