The simulation of urban-scale evacuation scenarios with application to the Swinley forest fire

Forest fires are an annual occurrence in many parts of the world forcing large-scale evacuation. The frequent and growing occurrence of these events makes it necessary to develop appropriate evacuation plans for areas that are susceptible to forest fires. The buildingEXODUS evacuation model has been extended to model large-scale urban evacuations by including the road network and open spaces (e.g. parks, green spaces and town squares) along with buildings. The evacuation simulation results have been coupled with the results of a forest fire spread model and applied to the Swinley forest fire which occurred in Berkshire, UK in May 2011. Four evacuation procedures differing in the routes taken by the pedestrians were evaluated providing key evacuation statistics such as time to reach the assembly location, the distance travelled, congestion experienced by the agents and the safety margins associated with using each evacuation route. A key finding of this work is the importance of formulating evacuation procedures that identifies the threatened population, provides timely evacuation notice, identifies appropriate routes that maintains a safe distance from the hazard front thereby maximising safety margins even at the cost of taking longer evacuation routes. Evacuation simulation offers a means of achieving these goals

Immersive real-time multi-user interaction with computer simulated pedestrians during emergencies

Crowd management is a key issue in large public assemblies in both emergency and nonemergency scenarios. It is important to be able to train for crowd management and test crowd management procedures for both emergency and non-emergency scenarios, however, full-scale exercises are costly, difficult and time consuming, and prevent exposure to immersive fire, smoke and toxic products. Interactive virtual training environments (VTE) with validated pedestrian dynamics are non-existent in firefighting and law enforcement training. Human behaviour is often made to appear real in VTEs rather than qualitatively correct and direct interaction with simulated agents is either not possible or limited to one-to-one interaction. An Immersive Real-time Interactive Simulation (IRIS) system is proposed to link a validated pedestrian behaviour computer model with an interactive virtual reality (VR) environment and Computational Fluid Dynamic Fire data produced by a CFD Engine. This 3-way link enables new use cases for using pedestrian behaviour models in new fields, for example real-time immersive and interactive first responder training with reactive crowd behaviour in fire scenarios. The linking of the software components also enables rapid prototyping, development, testing and verification of new behaviours and capabilities that are not currently present in the linked computer model. The IRIS system allows the model to be used for testing and prototyping of crowd procedures and theories in an interactive multi-user VR environment. To improve immersion in interactive VR fire scenarios, it is important to visualise smoke accurately and to represent the impact of heat and toxic products of the fire on the simulated population and user-controlled agents. A novel, real-time, accurate fire smoke visibility visualisation system is presented. Previously, accurate fire smoke visibility visualisation has been limited to expensive ray tracing algorithms as a post-processing tool, not allowing real-time virtual environments to benefit from accurate fire smoke visibility representation