Investigation of potential cognition factors correlated to fire evacuation

The design of a navigation system to support indoor fire evacuation depends not only on speed but also a relatively thorough consideration of the cognition factors. This study has investigated potential cognition factors which can affect the human behaviours and decision making during fire evacuation by taking a survey among indoor occupants in age of 20s under designed virtual scenarios. It mainly focuses on two aspects of Fire Responses Performances (FRP), i.e. indoor familiarity (spatial cognition) and psychological stress (situ-ated cognition). The collected results have shown that these cognition factors can be affected by gender and user height and they are correlated with each other in certain ways. It has also investigated users‟ attitudes to the navigation services under risky and non-risky conditions. The collected answers are also found to be correlated with the selected FRP factors. These findings may help to further design of personalized indoor navigation support for fire evacuation

Collective patterns under emergency conditions: Linking non-human biological organisms to pedestrians

Lack of complementary data under emergency conditions has hindered the progress of quantitative theories and models to simulate the collective dynamics of pedestrians. Previous studies have been limited in this way, but this study attempts to address that gap in data for model development and validation by using empirical data from non-human biological organisms. Experiments with panicking Argentine ants were performed to study collective pedestrian traffic. The experiments were the first to use non-human biological organisms to study the effect of geometrical structures to the collective movement patterns. Based on the experiments, a conceptual framework to model collective forces are presented. The practical applications of the experiments are also discussed. The proposed novel approach suggests a new direction in applying knowledge of the collective dynamical patterns of non-human entities to the collective dynamics of humans, in order to devise sound strategies to aid evacuation

Understanding pedestrian crowd panic: A review on model organisms approach

Understanding how crowds behave during collective displacement is at the heart of both pedestrian traffic engineering and 'movement ecology'. Perhaps the most critical reason for studying collective human dynamics under emergency/panic conditions is the lack of complementary data to develop and validate an explanatory model. A little used alternative is to study non-human model organisms. In this paper, we review experiences in using non-human organisms to study crowd panic in the literature. We then highlight the potential contribution that research with biological entities could make to understand the complex pedestrian behaviour and the enhancement of pedestrian safety during emergency/panic conditions. We also emphasise that understanding of behavioural similarities and dissimilarities between humans and animals is required for developing a good experimental design aimed to study collective behaviour. A generic model that could describe the common underlying mechanisms of crowd behaviour among organisms of different body sizes is identified as future challenge

Estimating pedestrian walking characteristics by use of smartphone sensing: an experimental study

Not availabl

Enhancing the panic escape of crowd through architectural design

Doors and corridors are necessary architectural elements in public infrastructure such as transit stations, buildings and stadiums. Previous documented crowd disasters have showed that collective movement patterns are affected by the layout or the geometrical structure of the escape area. However, little study has been carried out to examine these interactions under panic situation due to scarcity of data on human panic. Here, we use bio-inspired approach to test if making appropriate architectural adjustments within a given escape area would change the collective movement patterns in a way that enhances the outflow of the crowd. First, we performed a series of experiment with ants under panic conditions to test the effect of different structural features to the panic escape in a chamber with fixed dimension. Results show that the adjustments can be effective by more than 90% in decreasing the evacuation time. We then scaled it up and simulated the situation to human scenario and found that the model prediction is consistent with those observed from the empirical data. The proposed method demonstrates that detailed analysis of microscopic effects of escape environment would be a potentially valuable additional perspective to aid in devising solutions that are efficacious and improve the safety of the crowd

Understanding transport characteristics in disadvantaged regions of developing country: empirical study from Nepal

Government of Nepal accorded high priority to the development of transport in disadvantaged regions. However, current statistics reveal that the road sector failed to generate the promised impacts. There is an urgent need of research on understanding the characteristics of transport in disadvantaged regions in totality which could be integrated into transport planning in a sustainable way. We assessed the characteristics of transport that exists in the three rural settlements of Nepal through primary survey and examined the factors that contribute to the totality of transport. The study revealed that transport tasks related to meeting the basic subsistence outweighed those concerning to agriculture production and marketing. Proximity of the settlements to the highway/feeder road had little impact on overall transportation tasks of the households. Moreover, the transport burden is unduly higher on the female population. The findings can have major implications for the alteration of current transportation planning practices for disadvantaged regions

An analysis of core functions offered by software packages aimed at the supply chain management software market

The Purpose of this paper is to investigate the use of software packages (SP) aimed at the supply chain management (SCM) market. The aim is to analyse and classify the range of software functionalities offered by a variety of SCM-SPs currently in the market. This is important to gain an insight into the current and future trend in demands for applications of information & communication technology (ICT) for SCM. The study assumes that most ICT hardware used for SCM processes will require software interaction. Thus study of the variety of functionalities offered by SCM-SPs will provide insights into the use of ICT for SCM. In this paper, literature on SCM and applications of ICT for SCM is used to develop a SCM software function classification map (SCM-SFC map) for SPs aimed at the SCM market. The SCM-SFC map breaks down the SCM process into four key functional areas: sales management, relationship management, planning & production management and flow management. Each key functional area is further broken down into an overall of sixteen areas of core software functions. We then analysed 242 SCM-SPs currently in the market. We identified a total of 1295 software functionalities present in the 242 SCM-SPs. Each of these functionalities was then classified within the taxonomy of the SCM-SFC map. The results were used to identify areas of high and low intensity of core software functions and key SCM functionalities present in SCM-SPs analysed. The main finding indicated that flow management to coordinate supply chain operations consisted nearly half of functionalities offered by SCM-SPs. ICT is particularly useful in the SCM sector for prevention of bullwhip and cash flow bullwhip effects. The study also indicates a potential growing trend towards using ICT for forecasting at the upstream end of the supply chain. At the downstream end of the supply chain, the study suggests that ICT could increasingly be used for online retailing through software functionalities that e

Using non-human biological entities to understand pedestrian crowd behaviour under emergency conditions

Models of collective movement have been developed for both human crowds and animal herds and other aggregations but these models have not been used to test whether panicked crowds display generic features of dynamical behaviour regardless of species, and in particular whether a single model can explain panic behaviour in organisms of vastly different body size. We use a single modelling framework to examine crowd behaviour in ants and humans, which differ by 8 orders of magnitude in body mass. We assess whether simple allometric scaling of model parameter values, based only on the body mass difference, allows the model to describe the collective behaviour of the two species under panic conditions. We verified the model against experimental data from panicking Argentine ants (Linepithema humile) and then rescaled the parameter values to human body size. The predictions of rescaled model correspond to the quantitative data available for crowd panics, suggesting that the same kinds of interactions among individuals and with the physical environment govern crowd behaviour. We tested the effects of partial obstruction and the homogeneity of body sizes on the escape rate and found that appropriate selection of size and location of obstruction and homogeneity of body sizes can increase the outflow of pedestrians by more than double. Broader comparisons of crowd behaviour among species with different forms of locomotion and body size can enhance our theoretical understanding of crowd panics and potentially has applications in handling of agricultural animals as well as human public safet

Using system dynamics approach to examine the impact of ERP and Lean on manufacturing performance

The benefits of Lean manufacturing and Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) for manufacturing systems have been confirmed in the literature. However, there are continuing debates on the effects of these two systems on the manufacturing performance. Given this trend, this paper aims at quantitatively examining these impacts and offers insights for the managerial implications. A system dynamics approach is used to illustrate how the performance changes under different scenarios using the real data of a case study at the textile and garment industry. The results highlight the role of Lean manufacturing itself and lend support to the view of the inefficiency of ERP system to manufacturing system. A suggestion to build ERP-based Lean system which ERP supports Lean production is made for industry managers to gain the benefits from the ERP system

A review on the performance of an obstacle near an exit on pedestrian crowd evacuation

In a pioneering work in Nature journal, a counter-intuitive prediction that escape rates of people under panic conditions will be enhanced if an obstacle such as a column or a barrier is placed on the upstream side of an exit was demonstrated through a simulation model. However, the prediction lacked empirical verification. Despite the substantial works in this topic in the past decade, there is currently a lack of knowledge on how and to what extent the obstacle near an exit can enhance the pedestrian outflow at the bottlenecks during emergency escape. Therefore, the aim of this paper is to present a critical review on the performance of an obstacle near an exit and identify future research directions. It is found that although there is a general consensus on the beneficial effect of an obstacle, there is a large uncertainty on the situations on which the positive effect of obstacle could be observed. In addition, verification of the model's prediction with empirical data with humans is still largely unexplored. There is no clear established relationship between the exit width, obstacle distance and obstacle size/shape. Also, quantitative understanding of the nature of the clogging transition due to obstacle is a challenging task. Further, researchers have questioned the implementation of such obstacles at bottlenecks in real life scenario. A systematic approach of optimising architectural adjustments that enhances escape dynamics of pedestrians crowd in indoor and outdoor public spaces needs to be conducted in future