According to current force health protection policy, the U.S. Army’s Health Service Support system is designed to maintain a healthy force and to conserve the combat strength of deployed soldiers. Specifically, this system remains particularly effective by employing standardized aeromedical evacuation assets and providing a responsive field-sited medical treatment facility for the wounded soldi...

The decision of whether to evacuate or shelter-in-place SIP in a wildfire poses a significant challenge for emergency managers and residents in fire-prone areas. Events such as the 2007 Witch Creek Fire and 2008 Tea Fire in California highlight the option and viability of SIP, as well as the conflict that can occur between first-responders and residents in protecting life and property. In gener...

OBJECTIVE Japan's 2011 Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant incident required the evacuation of over a million people, creating a large displaced population with potentially increased vulnerability in terms of chronic health conditions. We assessed the long-term impact of evacuation on diabetes, hyperlipidaemia and hypertension. PARTICIPANTS We considered participants in annual public health...

Catastrophic events have raised numerous issues concerning how effectively the built environment accommodates the evacuation needs of individuals with disabilities. Individuals with disabilities represent a significant, yet often overlooked, portion of the population disproportionately affected in emergency situations. Incorporating disability considerations into emergency evacuation planning, ...

During the evacuation process, the most challenging task is to move people to safer locations. As time is the decision factor in the evacuation process, urgent and firmly decisions are required. An evacuation plan should be efficiently constructed by taking into account the routes of vehicle. This paper explored the feasibility of using a discrete particle swarm optimization (DPSO) algorithm to...

Complex cognitive processes corresponding to human control behaviors cannot be easily inferred using (1) a logical rule-based model, (2) a statistical model, or (3) an analytical predictive model. Predicting human behaviors in complex and uncertain environments like emergency evacuation is considered almost impossible (at least NP hard) in systems theory. In this paper, we explore simulating hu...

In the fast evacuation problem, we study the path planning problem for two robots who want to minimize the worst-case evacuation time on the unit disk. The robots are initially placed at the center of the disk. In order to evacuate, they need to reach an unknown point, the exit, on the boundary of the disk. Once one of the robots finds the exit, it will instantaneously notify the other agent, w...

Antarctica is one of the most remote regions on Earth. Mass casualty incident (MCI) responses in Antarctica are prone to complications from multiple environmental and operational challenges. This review of the current status of MCI risks and response strategies for Antarctica focuses on aeromedical evacuation, a critical component of many possible MCI scenarios. Extreme cold and weather, a lack...