Post-Earthquake Traffic Simulation Considering Road Traversability

Post-earthquake road traversability is a critical factor that affects traffic conditions. Therefore, a post-earthquake traffic simulation method considering road traversability was proposed in this study. First, the impact ranges of the earthquake-induced building collapse and the post-earthquake fire spread of buildings were analyzed, and road traversability was determined accordingly. Subsequently, the post-earthquake traffic flow was predicted based on building characteristics, and micro-level vehicle behaviors were simulated considering post-earthquake road traversability to determine the traffic conditions. In addition, the simulation model was validated using actual data. Finally, a segment of the Tongzhou road network in Beijing was selected as a case study to analyze post-earthquake road traversability and simulate traffic conditions on critical road sections. The proposed method can provide post-earthquake traffic conditions, which benefits the decision-making of post-earthquake evacuation and rescue

Post-Earthquake Traffic Simulation Considering Road Traversability

Post-earthquake road traversability is a critical factor that affects traffic conditions. Therefore, a post-earthquake traffic simulation method considering road traversability was proposed in this study. First, the impact ranges of the earthquake-induced building collapse and the post-earthquake fire spread of buildings were analyzed, and road traversability was determined accordingly. Subsequently, the post-earthquake traffic flow was predicted based on building characteristics, and micro-level vehicle behaviors were simulated considering post-earthquake road traversability to determine the traffic conditions. In addition, the simulation model was validated using actual data. Finally, a segment of the Tongzhou road network in Beijing was selected as a case study to analyze post-earthquake road traversability and simulate traffic conditions on critical road sections. The proposed method can provide post-earthquake traffic conditions, which benefits the decision-making of post-earthquake evacuation and rescue

Virtual Fire Evacuation Drills through a Web-Based Serious Game

Evacuation capacity is very important in building fire. In order to improve the safety evacuation capacity of occupants, a web-based serious game for virtual fire evacuation drills is proposed. As a prototype of the serious game, a stand-alone system for virtual drill had been developed. On this basis, the system framework of the serious game is first designed for web-based training, including the database, front and back ends. Secondly, an optimization solution including fire scenes and web codes is designed for smooth rendering performance. Lastly, a solution is designed to visualize the evacuation paths of numerous trainees, which can be used to reveal the evacuation rules, and an evaluation model of evacuation performance is created considering the features of evacuation paths and fire hazards, to provide comprehensive feedback for trainees. Thus, a convenient and accessible web-based serious game was developed. More than 100 people participated in the online virtual evacuation drill of a dormitory building fire. Through the drills, the average evacuation time of the trainees decreases from 79.77 s to 54.32 s, and the safety scores of the trainees improve from 74.71 to 81.21. Therefore, the evacuation abilities of trainees gradually improve, which demonstrates the effectiveness of the drill. Consequently, virtual fire drills using a web-based serious game can play an important role in improving the evacuation ability

Containment Control of Heterogeneous Systems with Active Leaders of Bounded Unknown Control using Reinforcement Learning

This paper solves the containment problem of multi-agent systems on undirected graph with multiple active leaders using off-policy reinforcement learning (RL). The leaders are active in the sense that there exists bounded control input in the dynamics which is unknown to all followers and the followers are heterogeneous with different dynamics. Not only the steady states of agent i but also the transient trajectories are taken into account to impose optimality to the proposed containment control. Inhomogeneous algebraic Riccati equations (ARE) are derived to solve the optimal containment control protocol. To avoid the requirement of agents\u27 dynamics to obtain containment control, an off-policy RL algorithm is developed to solve the inhomogeneous AREs online in real time and without requiring any knowledge of the agents\u27 dynamics. Finally, a simulation example is presented to illustrate the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm