Passenger Flows in Underground Railway Stations and Platforms, MTI Report 12-43

Urban rail systems are designed to carry large volumes of people into and out of major activity centers. As a result, the stations at these major activity centers are often crowded with boarding and alighting passengers, resulting in passenger inconvenience, delays, and at times danger. This study examines the planning and analysis of station passenger queuing and flows to offer rail transit station designers and transit system operators guidance on how to best accommodate and manage their rail passengers. The objectives of the study are to: 1) Understand the particular infrastructural, operational, behavioral, and spatial factors that affect and may constrain passenger queuing and flows in different types of rail transit stations; 2) Identify, compare, and evaluate practices for efficient, expedient, and safe passenger flows in different types of station environments and during typical (rush hour) and atypical (evacuations, station maintenance/ refurbishment) situations; and 3) Compile short-, medium-, and long-term recommendations for optimizing passenger flows in different station environments

Handbook of Tsunami Evacuation Planning - SCHEMA (Scenarios for Hazard-induced Emergencies Management), Project n° 030963, Specific Targeted Research Project, Space Priority

This handbook is dedicated to provide thorough and hands-on information in order to produce fully-comprehensive methodology of tsunami evacuation plan generation. Hence community-employed decision makers or similar stakeholders are supplied with a detailed guideline to implement a fully-fledged evacuation plan within three stages : set-up of valid first instance of evacuation plan, mid-term revision, and long-term revision and integration. Local tsunami risk assessment and all subsequent implications on evacuation planning are based on (1) knowing the to-be-expected tsunami wave height, and (2) the to-be-expected arrival time of the first devastating tsunami wave. The first parameter helps to calculate the area at risk ; the second parameter gives an indication of how fast the evacuation has to take place. Consequently, the evacuation plan instance must guarantee that a certain number of affected persons has to be brought onto safe areas within a given time limit. Safe areas (shelters) are higher located places, either on natural ground, or on artificially built-up constructions including building higher than three stores. Evacuation has to take place on a given network of suitable roads or paths. In this context, if necessary, the methodology foresees also the inclusion of additionally to be built escape routes and/or safe places in order to produce a fully working evacuation plan that fulfills the basic requirements. The methodology also explains how to implement a valid instance of evacuation plan by marking the identified escape routes and shelters in reality, and how to disseminate all information to the affected population. Within a mid-term review the evacuation plan has to be maintained constantly and appropriate authority-own measures have to be guaranteed. The long-term review, finally, keeps track of all other information needed to run the evacuation plan properly : integration with early-warning systems, integration with other emergency plans, checking of legal obligations. In addition, the whole evacuation plan must be reviewed together with the affected population and a maximum of acceptance be obtained. In this contaxt, and if necessary, adaptations should be made in order to guarantee the well-functioning of the whole plan within its best performance.JRC.DG.G.7-Traceability and vulnerability assessmen

A risk analysis methodology for the use of crowd models during the Covid-19 pandemic

Pandemics such as Covid-19 have posed a set of questions concerning safe space usage given the risk of virus transmission in confined and open spaces. In this context, this report presents a risk analysis methodology for the use of crowd modelling tools as an aid to assess safety in confined and open spaces. Crowd models can be used to investigate people movement in the built environment, thus they have a great potential for the performance of proximity analysis. The report presented here addresses first the psychological and physical aspects linked to physical distancing (also called social distancing). Given the limited current knowledge on human behaviour and space usage during pandemics, the changes needed in crowd modelling tools to appropriately represent people movement are listed. This includes issues associated with modifications of the fundamental relationships between the key people movement variables (speed/flow vs density), and issues linked with interactions between pedestrians (e.g. collision avoidance, queuing mechanisms, route choice). Suggestions for new crowd modelling outputs are provided in order to enhance their use during pandemics. In addition, practical solutions concerning space usage are presented in light of the assessment of human safety through a risk evaluation based on proximity analysis and/or exposure assessment. This is deemed to help identifying design and management solutions to decrease the risk of virus transmission

Performance Measures to Assess Resiliency and Efficiency of Transit Systems

Transit agencies are interested in assessing the short-, mid-, and long-term performance of infrastructure with the objective of enhancing resiliency and efficiency. This report addresses three distinct aspects of New Jersey’s Transit System: 1) resiliency of bridge infrastructure, 2) resiliency of public transit systems, and 3) efficiency of transit systems with an emphasis on paratransit service. This project proposed a conceptual framework to assess the performance and resiliency for bridge structures in a transit network before and after disasters utilizing structural health monitoring (SHM), finite element (FE) modeling and remote sensing using Interferometric Synthetic Aperture Radar (InSAR). The public transit systems in NY/NJ were analyzed based on their vulnerability, resiliency, and efficiency in recovery following a major natural disaster

Role of opinion sharing on the emergency evacuation dynamics

Emergency evacuation is a critical research topic and any improvement to the existing evacuation models will help in improving the safety of the evacuees. Currently, there are evacuation models that have either an accurate movement model or a sophisticated decision model. Individuals in a crowd tend to share and propagate their opinion. This opinion sharing part is either implicitly modeled or entirely overlooked in most of the existing models. Thus, one of the overarching goal of this research is to the study the effect of opinion evolution through an evacuating crowd. First, the opinion evolution in a crowd was modeled mathematically. Next, the results from the analytical model were validated with a simulation model having a simple motion model. To improve the fidelity of the evacuation model, a more realistic movement and decision model were incorporated and the effect of opinion sharing on the evacuation dynamics was studied extensively. Further, individuals with strong inclination towards particular route were introduced and their effect on overall efficiency was studied. Current evacuation guidance algorithms focuses on efficient crowd evacuation. The method of guidance delivery is generally overlooked. This important gap in guidance delivery is addressed next. Additionally, a virtual reality based immersive experiment is designed to study factors affecting individuals\u27 decision making during emergency evacuation

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

Multi-Agent Fitness Functions For Evolutionary Architecture

The dynamics of crowd movements are self-organising and often involve complex pattern formations. Although computational models have recently been developed, it is unclear how well their underlying methods capture local dynamics and longer-range aspects, such as evacuation. A major part of this thesis is devoted to an investigation of current methods, and where required, the development of alternatives. The main purpose is to utilise realistic models of pedestrian crowds in the design of fitness functions for an evolutionary approach to architectural design. We critically review the state-of-the-art in pedestrian and evacuation dynamics. The concept of 'Multi-Agent System' embraces a number of approaches, which together encompass important local and longer-range aspects. Early investigations focus on methods-cellular automata and attractor fields-designed to capture these respective levels. The assumption that pattern formations in crowds result from local processes is reflected in two dimensional cellular automata models, where mathematical rules operate in local neighbourhoods. We investigate an established cellular automata and show that lane-formation patterns are stable only in a low-valued density range. Above this range, such patterns suddenly randomise. By identifying and then constraining the source of this randomness, we are only able to achieve a small degree of improvement. Moreover, when we try to integrate the model with attractor fields, no useful behaviour is achieved, and much of the randomness persists. Investigations indicate that the unwanted randomness is associated with 2-lattice phase transitions, where local dynamics get invaded by giant-component clusters during the onset of lattice percolation. Through this in-depth investigation, the general limits to cellular automata are ascertained-these methods are not designed with lattice percolation properties in mind and resulting models depend, often critically, on arbitrarily chosen neighbourhoods. We embark on the development of new and more flexible methodologies. Rather than treating local and global dynamics as separate entities, we combine them. Our methods are responsive to percolation, and are designed around the following principles: 1) Inclusive search provides an optimal path between a pedestrian origin and destination. 2) Dynamic boundaries protect search and are based on percolation probabilities, calculated from local density regimes. In this way, more robust dynamics are achieved. Simultaneously, longer-range behaviours are also specified. 3) Network-level dynamics further relax the constraints of lattice percolation and allow a wider range of pedestrian interactions. Having defined our methods, we demonstrate their usefulness by applying them to lane-formation and evacuation scenarios. Results reproduce the general patterns found in real crowds. We then turn to evolution. This preliminary work is intended to motivate future research in the field of Evolutionary Architecture. We develop a genotype-phenotype mapping, which produces complex architectures, and demonstrate the use of a crowd-flow model in a phenotype-fitness mapping. We discuss results from evolutionary simulations, which suggest that obstacles may have some beneficial effect on crowd evacuation. We conclude with a summary, discussion of methodological limitations, and suggestions for future research

Application of universal design in the built environment

This objective of this book is to disseminate information related to what is access audit, why carry out an access audit, access survey and the process of implementing it in built environment specifically to our existing buildings. It also to inform the public especially professional in the building industries such architects, engineers, planners, landscape architect, contractor, technical people from the local authorities, administrators and politician the importance of providing access in our built environment continuously in a seamless journey inside and outside buildings. This book will further disseminate information regarding access audit to built environment, explain on the procedures in accessing a building and to do the checklist on how to analyze an access audi