0000000000302904
AUTHOR
Parvaneh Sarshar
Crowd Models for Emergency Evacuation: A Review Targeting Human-Centered Sensing
Emergency evacuation of crowds is a fascinating phenomenon that has attracted researchers from various fields. Better understanding of this class of crowd behavior opens up for improving evacuation policies and smarter design of buildings, increasing safety. Recently, a new class of disruptive technology has appeared: Human-centered sensing which allows crowd behavior to be monitored in real-time, and provides the basis for real-time crowd control. The question then becomes: to what degree can previous crowd models incorporate this development, and what areas need further research? In this paper, we provide a survey that describes some widely used crowd models and discuss their advantages a…
On the Usability of Smartphone Apps in Emergencies
It is very critical that the disaster management smartphone app users be able to interact efficiently and effectively with the app during an emergen-cy. An overview of the challenges face for designing mobile HCI in emergency management tools is presented in this paper. Then, two recently developed emergency management tools, titled GDACSmobile and SmartRescue, are studied from usability and HCI challenges point of view. These two tools use mobile app and smartphone sensors as the main functionality respectively. Both have a smartphone app and a web-based app with different UIs for their different user groups. Furthermore, the functionality of these apps in the format of a designed scenario…
A Spatio-temporal Probabilistic Model of Hazard and Crowd Dynamics in Disasters for Evacuation Planning
Published version of a chapter in the book: Recent Trends in Applied Artificial Intelligence. Also available from the publisher at: http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-38577-3_7 Managing the uncertainties that arise in disasters – such as ship fire – can be extremely challenging. Previous work has typically focused either on modeling crowd behavior or hazard dynamics, targeting fully known environments. However, when a disaster strikes, uncertainty about the nature, extent and further development of the hazard is the rule rather than the exception. Additionally, crowd and hazard dynamics are both intertwined and uncertain, making evacuation planning extremely difficult. To address this chal…
Comparing Different Crowd Emergency Evacuation Models Based on Human Centered Sensing Criteria
Emergency evacuation of crowds is a fascinating phenomenon that has attracted researchers from various fields. Better understanding of this class of crowd behavior opens up for improving evacuation policies and smarter design of buildings, increasing safety. Recently, a new class of disruptive technology has appeared: Human-centered sensing which allows crowd behavior to be monitored in real-time, and provides the basis for real-time crowd control. The question then becomes: to what degree can previous crowd models incorporate this development, and what areas need further research? In this paper, the authors provide a survey that describes some widely used crowd models and discuss the advan…
A Bayesian network model for evacuation time analysis during a ship fire
We present an evacuation model for ships while a fire happens onboard. The model is designed by utilizing Bayesian networks (BN) and then simulated in GeNIe software. In our proposed model, the most important factors that have significant influence on a rescue process and evacuation time are identified and analyzed. By applying the probability distribution of the considered factors collected from the literature including IMO, real empirical data and practical experiences, the trend of the rescue process and evacuation time can be evaluated and predicted using the proposed model. The results of this paper help understanding about possible consequences of influential factors on the security o…
Ant colony optimisation for planning safe escape routes
Published version of a chapter from the volume: Recent Trends in Applied Artificial Intelligence. Also available on SpringerLink: http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-38577-3_6 An emergency requiring evacuation is a chaotic event filled with uncertainties both for the people affected and rescuers. The evacuees are often left to themselves for navigation to the escape area. The chaotic situation increases when a predefined escape route is blocked by a hazard, and there is a need to re-think which escape route is safest. This paper addresses automatically finding the safest escape route in emergency situations in large buildings or ships with imperfect knowledge of the hazards. The proposed so…
A Study on the Usage of Smartphone Apps in Fire Scenarios - Comparison between GDACSmobile and SmartRescue Apps
In this paper, we present a thorough overview of the two recently developed applications in the field of emergency management. The applications titled GDACSmobile and SmartRescue are using mobile app and smartphone sensors as the main functionality respectively. Furthermore, we argue the differences and similarities of both applications and highlight their strengths and weaknesses. Finally, a critical scenario for fire emergency in a music festival is designed and the applicability of the features of each application in supporting the emergency management procedure is discussed. It is also argued how the aforementioned applications can support each other during emergencies and what the pote…