Evacuation route planning is one of the most crucial tasks for solving massive evacuation problem. In large public places, pedestrians should be transferred to safe areas when nature or man-made accidents happen. A multi-objective ant colony algorithm for massive pedestrian evacuation is presented in this paper. In the algorithm, three objectives, total evacuation time of all evacuees, total ro...

CONTEXT Evacuation and shelter-in-place decision making for hospitals is complex, and existing literature contains little information about how these decisions are made in practice. OBJECTIVE To describe decision-making processes and identify determinants of acute care hospital evacuation and shelter-in-place during Hurricane Sandy. DESIGN Semistructured interviews were conducted from March...

INTRODUCTION Due to the fact that most high-rise structures (i.e., >75 feet high, or eight to ten stories) are constructed with extensive and redundant fire safety features, current fire safety procedures typically only involve limited evacuation during minor to moderate fire emergencies. Therefore, full-scale evacuation of high-rise buildings is highly unusual and consequently, little is known...

In this paper, we study the agility of evacuation routes in relation to dynamically changing unpredictable hazardous conditions. Infrastructure safety conditions may unpredictably change through time. Due to unpredictability, evacuees’ safety can get jeopardized at any point of the evacuation route. Thus, it is not sufficient only to find the shortest evacuation route considering present safety...

The emergency evacuation test method of rail transit station not only affects the operation safety of the station, but it also has significant influence on the scale and cost of the station. A reasonable test method should guarantee both the safety of evacuation and that the investment is neither excessive nor too conservative. The paper compares and analyzes the differences of the existing eme...

OBJECTIVES We sought to determine predictors of uterine evacuation for women undergoing medical abortion using mifepristone and vaginal misoprostol through 63 days' gestation. STUDY DESIGN We pooled data from two prospective multicenter medical abortion trials. In one study, women received mifepristone 200 mg followed either 6-8 or 23-25 h later by misoprostol 800 mcg vaginally. In the second...

In this paper, simulation of fire in a short 2-lane road tunnel and its evacuation are described. Two traffic situations in the tunnel and their impact on people evacuation in fire conditions are analyzed. For simulation of the tunnel fire, the FDS (Fire Dynamics Simulator) system, version 5.5.3 based on advanced CFD (Computational Fluid Dynamics) fire model is used. The evacuation of people in...

Abstract: In times of disaster, or other emergency situations, it is critical for people to be evacuated in a smooth manner. However, people often tend to panic when faced with disaster, crowding the evacuation passageways of buildings in the event of fire and congesting roads with cars containing people fleeing from predicted hurricanes. In such situations, an evacuation guidance system might ...

With the frequent occurrence of major emergencies, emergency management gets high attention from all around the world. This paper investigates the comprehensive optimization of major emergency evacuation route and departure time, in which case the evacuation propagation mechanism is considered under traffic control. Given the practical assumptions, we first establish a comprehensive optimizatio...