8,149 research outputs found
Evacuation Plans and Simulations for Crowd Egress – A Review
Due to growing population density and increasing complexity and congestion of human habitat evacuation planning is essential to avoid major loss of life during a natural or un-natural disaster. The paper provides a review of existing evacuation systems and strategies and also points out the possible research directions. Intelligent Evacuation Management System coupled with evolutionary and machine learning techniques such as PSO,ACO , k-mean clustering is a promising solution to ensure safe and jostle free egress of people.
Intelligent evacuation management systems: A review
Crowd and evacuation management have been active areas of research and study in the recent past. Various developments continue to take place in the process of efficient evacuation of crowds in mass gatherings. This article is intended to provide a review of intelligent evacuation management systems covering the aspects of crowd monitoring, crowd disaster prediction, evacuation modelling, and evacuation path guidelines. Soft computing approaches play a vital role in the design and deployment of intelligent evacuation applications pertaining to crowd control management. While the review deals with video and nonvideo based aspects of crowd monitoring and crowd disaster prediction, evacuation techniques are reviewed via the theme of soft computing, along with a brief review on the evacuation navigation path. We believe that this review will assist researchers in developing reliable automated evacuation systems that will help in ensuring the safety of the evacuees especially during emergency evacuation scenarios
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
Measuring and improving community resilience: a Fuzzy Logic approach
Due to the increasing frequency of natural and man-made disasters worldwide,
the scientific community has paid considerable attention to the concept of
resilience engineering in recent years. Authorities and decision-makers, on the
other hand, have been focusing their efforts to develop strategies that can
help increase community resilience to different types of extreme events. Since
it is often impossible to prevent every risk, the focus is on adapting and
managing risks in ways that minimize impacts to communities (e.g., humans and
other systems). Several resilience strategies have been proposed in the
literature to reduce disaster risk and improve community resilience. Generally,
resilience assessment is challenging due to uncertainty and unavailability of
data necessary for the estimation process. This paper proposes a Fuzzy Logic
method for quantifying community resilience. The methodology is based on the
PEOPLES framework, an indicator-based hierarchical framework that defines all
aspects of the community. A fuzzy-based approach is implemented to quantify the
PEOPLES indicators using descriptive knowledge instead of hard data, accounting
also for the uncertainties involved in the analysis. To demonstrate the
applicability of the methodology, data regarding the functionality of the city
San Francisco before and after the Loma Prieta earthquake are used to obtain a
resilience index of the Physical Infrastructure dimension of the PEOPLES
framework. The results show that the methodology can provide good estimates of
community resilience despite the uncertainty of the indicators. Hence, it
serves as a decision-support tool to help decision-makers and stakeholders
assess and improve the resilience of their communities
Training of Crisis Mappers and Map Production from Multi-sensor Data: Vernazza Case Study (Cinque Terre National Park, Italy)
This aim of paper is to presents the development of a multidisciplinary project carried out by the cooperation between Politecnico di Torino and ITHACA (Information Technology for Humanitarian Assistance, Cooperation and Action). The goal of the project was the training in geospatial data acquiring and processing for students attending Architecture and Engineering Courses, in order to start up a team of "volunteer mappers". Indeed, the project is aimed to document the environmental and built heritage subject to disaster; the purpose is to improve the capabilities of the actors involved in the activities connected in geospatial data collection, integration and sharing. The proposed area for testing the training activities is the Cinque Terre National Park, registered in the World Heritage List since 1997. The area was affected by flood on the 25th of October 2011. According to other international experiences, the group is expected to be active after emergencies in order to upgrade maps, using data acquired by typical geomatic methods and techniques such as terrestrial and aerial Lidar, close-range and aerial photogrammetry, topographic and GNSS instruments etc.; or by non conventional systems and instruments such us UAV, mobile mapping etc. The ultimate goal is to implement a WebGIS platform to share all the data collected with local authorities and the Civil Protectio
A Comprehensive Study on Pedestrians' Evacuation
Human beings face threats because of unexpected happenings, which can be
avoided through an adequate crisis evacuation plan, which is vital to stop
wound and demise as its negative results. Consequently, different typical
evacuation pedestrians have been created. Moreover, through applied research,
these models for various applications, reproductions, and conditions have been
examined to present an operational model. Furthermore, new models have been
developed to cooperate with system evacuation in residential places in case of
unexpected events. This research has taken into account an inclusive and a
'systematic survey of pedestrian evacuation' to demonstrate models methods by
focusing on the applications' features, techniques, implications, and after
that gather them under various types, for example, classical models, hybridized
models, and generic model. The current analysis assists scholars in this field
of study to write their forthcoming papers about it, which can suggest a novel
structure to recent typical intelligent reproduction with novel features
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