CA Simulation & Experiment On Occupant Evacuation Involving Environment Information & Individual Characteristics

Occupant evacuation is a kind of complex process with multi-elements, including the behavioral response to environment information and people's movement. Research work on this field is mainly developed by computer simulation, because the available data from realistic evacuation drills is scarce.In Chapter 1, methods and contents in studying occupant evacuation are introduced. The key idea of this paper is also summarized: to develop an occupant evacuation model involving the individual characteristics and the impact of enviornment information (such as: the sound of fire alarm); to study some special phenomena observed in evacuation and to find out some factors that could have an impact on evacuation efficiency by using this model. In addition, the simulational results should be compared with experimental results to examine the model's applicability and improve it.In the two following chapters, a occupant movement model based on Cellular Automaton (CA) has been introduced. Some individual characteristics have been involved and studied within normal condition. In Chapter 2, the dynamics process of movement with "jostle- through" behavior has been focused. A numerical method is proposed to describe individual behaviors, including "jostle-through": P_ex is introduced as the success probability of a single winning through. Counter flow and 2-dimension flow have been studied by means of simulation. We find that there are four phases of the dynamics flow, i.e., free phase, transition phase, restriction phase and jam phase, dependent on the system density and the micro-characters. For circular boundary condition, it is also found that the critical density is independent with the system size. Individual route is investigated, and the practical interval of pedestrian density for jostles is given, which is according with the human dimensions of Chinese population.In Chapter 3, the right-side-preference (people prefer to walk on the right-hand side of road or channel) has been investigated, as an asymmetrical behavior that should not be ignored in occupant movement. In this chapter, pedestrian counter-flow in a channel is simulated using CA model. The right-preference intensity, k, is introduced, defined as the ratio of the right-moving probability to left-moving probability. In simulations, the dynamical transition between fluid and jammed phase is presented. With a fixed k, the critical density is independent of the channel size. According to research results on physiology and sociology, k =1,2,8 have been tested, and k =8 is satisfied in this work. Furthermore, we have discussed one updated equation for k. At the end of this chapter, simulation results are compared with Japanese experiments (M.Isobe, 2004). It is found that right-preference is effective when the density is below critical. The model is shown to be useful to simulate and analyze this situation numerically.Based on people's movement under normal condition, we focus our attention on how to describe the occupant behavior and response in emergency. It is the most important part of this paper. In Chapter 4, an evacuation model involving environment information with multi-velocity occupant has been proposed. As essential elements in occupant evacuation, the "static informaiton"(building structure, spacial inertia,etc.) and "dynamic information" (sounds of fire alarm, etc.) have been studied by means of simulation and experiments. We have presented experimental and simulation results on the evacuation of a classroom in 7 conditions (occupant number, visual-field, alarm, exit width, etc.), focusing on the individual escape times and the escape flow rates as a function of time. Despite the stochastic nature of occupant movement, the empirical observations could be semi-quantitatively reproduced by our model.At the end of Chapter 4, an evacuation model based on information transfer system is planned, as an extensive development of the theoretical method into practical software. The special and general theory of information transfer within evacuation is introduced in this chapter.In Chapter 5, the main work of this paper is summarized and their development in the future is expected.