Engineering egress data considering pedestrians with reduced mobility

To quantify the evacuation process, evacuation practitioners use engineering egress data describing the occupant movement characteristics. These data are typically based to young and fit populations. However, the movement abilities of occupants who might be involved in evacuations are becoming more variable—with the building populations of today typically including increasing numbers of individuals: with impairments or who are otherwise elderly or generally less mobile. Thus, there will be an increasing proportion of building occupants with reduced ability to egress. For safe evacuation, there is therefore a need to provide valid engineering egress data considering pedestrians with disabilities. Gwynne and Boyce recently compiled a series of data sets related to the evacuation process to support practitioner activities in the chapter Engineering Data in the SFPE Handbook of Fire Protection Engineering. This paper supplements these data sets by providing information on and presenting data obtained from additional research related to the premovement and horizontal movement of participants with physical‐, cognitive‐, or age‐related disabilities. The aim is to provide an overview of currently available data sets related to, and key factors affecting the egress performance of, mixed ability populations which could be used to guide fire safety engineering decisions in the context of building design.     

Emergency egress for the elderly in care home fire situations

Practitioners are continuing to develop egress modelling software for the design of the built environment. These models require data about human behaviour and factors for calibration, validation and verification. This study aims to address the specific data and knowledge gap: emergency egress of the elderly. Such data are difficult to collect given privacy and consent concerns, with strong relationships generally being required between residences and researchers. Through the observation of nine fire drills at six Canadian long-term care (LTC) and retirement homes, specific evacuation actions and behaviour were observed for 37 staff members and information about the evacuation of 56 residents was collected. These drills demonstrated that emergency egress in LTC and retirement homes is highly staff dependent with 72% of residents recorded requiring full assistance at all stages of movement in evacuation, and that the type of announced/unannounced drill and level of resident care will affect the type of data collected. The development of travel speed and pre-movement is discussed subject to limitation with qualitative behavioural insights of residents that were observed. This study provides valuable methodological discussion on how to conduct behavioural studies in similar highly restricted research environments. Specific attention is given to understanding the considerations that must be made when using fire drills as data sources, and the impact that these can have on using such data for modelling. This study may inform the initial setup and programming of evacuation models from an actions and behavioural perspectives of staff members and residents.     

室内水上乐园火灾人员安全疏散评估

由于建筑特殊性、功能多样性和致灾危险性,城市室内水上乐园历来是消防监督工作的重中之重。在进行火灾风险评估的过程中,烟气流动控制、人员安全疏散始终是评估工作的重点。以某室内水上乐园为例,根据消防安全工程学原理,针对不同季节、不同业态、游客行动能力及游乐设施特点等因素,按照最不利原则建立火灾场景模型,利用烟气层温度、CO浓度等控制性指标,对烟气流动和人员疏散开展定性与定量相结合的模拟分析,为城市室内水上乐园及相似的大跨度、大空间、多业态场所开展火灾风险评估提供参考。     

地下人行通道总体布局规划思路与方法

地下人行通道总体布局规划是城市地下空间开发利用规划编制过程中重要分项环节,其规划内容分为两个层次,一是过街地下通道的总体布局,二是重点区域地下人行流线的组织引导。确定这两方面内容,需要先划定地下人行连通重点区域,并作为分析基础。按照这一思路,本文结合实际项目,从三个方面论述其编制方法:第一,通过价值分区评价法来划定地下人行连通重点区域;第二,通过需求分布评价法来确定过街地下通道建设布点;第三,以构建连续步行空间为导向,细化过街地下通道空间落实,统筹人行地下连接通道空间布局,形成完整的地下步行网络。     

溃坝应急预案有效性评价

水库大坝突发事件应急预案是水库大坝风险管理的重要组成部分,近年来水库管理机构相继开展了突发事件应急预案的编制。但所编制的应急预案是否能够实现预定的风险管理目标,亟需建立切实可行的方法加以检验。基于地理信息系统技术,通过模拟研究区受灾居民点最佳撤离路径和撤离时间,提出了定量评价水库大坝突发事件应急预案有效性的方法,并通过实例应用,为今后进一步开展应急预案的有效性评价研究提供了基础和参考。     

基于行为认知分析的消防疏散图设计研究

目的 通过分析用户疏散过程与使用消防疏散图过程的行为与认知,探讨消防疏散图产品定位和视觉设计策略。方法 通过行为观察、访谈、实验方法分析用户疏散行为与认知过程,梳理用户认知要点和需求;通过行为观察、访谈方法,结合认知理论,分析用户使用消防疏散图行为与认知过程;采用眼动仪实验和主观评价获取数据,并进行相关性分析,分析用户使用消防疏散图认知过程的关键视觉影响因子。结论 梳理了用户消防疏散的行为过程、所需信息和信息区域;梳理了消防疏散图中影响用户认知的视觉影响因子;通过眼动仪实验获取了用户使用疏散图的认知效率数据,并分析了视觉影响因子与认知效率的相关性。在以上研究基础上提出消防疏散图的原则与策略。     

辅助救护人员配置对介护老人安全疏散影响研究

运用Pathfinder仿真软件,从安全疏散角度研究养老建筑中护理人员人力配置问题,为养老建筑人员疏散配置提供理论基础,为相关政策措施的制定提供依据.研究结果表明:人力供应阶段,随着护理人员数量增加,疏散所用的时间减少,但呈现边际效用递减的趋势;外部人力再供应阶段,消防救援人员人数增加,疏散所用的时间减少,同样呈现边际...     

基于改进ACO算法的建筑疏散路径优化研究

针对大型公共建筑存在的结构复杂、消防疏散困难等问题,提出了用于优化疏散路径的改进蚁群算法。首先,针对基本蚁群算法(ACO)引入Dijkstra 算法,并利用Dijkstra 算法计算出全局性较好的次优路径进而对蚁群算法初始信息素分布情况进行了加强。其次,根据火灾的实时情况改进了蚁群算法的转移概率、更新规则、信息素挥发系数、启发函数等。最后,对改进的蚁群算法进行对比仿真实验。实验结果表明该算法具有较强的全局搜索能力以及较高的搜索效率,能够避免算法进入局部最优陷阱,有效提高消防疏散路径规划效率。     

Less is more: empirical design criteria for a tourist place recommendation service which decelerates the visiting experience

Tourist recommendation services provide suggestions for places of interest. While the spatial structure of a tourist's visit has been successfully exploited to improve the quality of place recommendations, its temporal structure has not been taken into account so far. This is surprising because the importance of the visitors' time management is well known from tourism research. We present findings of an empirical study that sheds light on the temporal aspects of tourist exploration behaviour and discuss implications for the design of tourist-recommender systems. The data-set consists of interviews, GPS tracks and geo-referenced photo sequences from visitors of a typical Middle European destination for cultural tourism. Among the results relevant to place recommending are the following: (1) the set of places is often replanned during the visit; (2) comparing place popularity based on photo frequency and place popularity based on staying time, we found notable differences in rank ordering; and (3) the photo frequency and the detour sinuosity of the GPS tracks are decreasing slowly over time. We interpret this last finding as a time-geographic cone effect. Based on the empirical results, we discuss the implications for the design of tourist-recommending services and propose a corresponding user interface utilising a recommendation strategy that tries to counterbalance the time-geographic cone effect, that is, to decelerate the visiting experience.     

Editorial

Mobile pedestrian navigation systems are one of the most popular Location-Based Services. In the era of Web 2.0, current mobile navigation systems often suffer from the following problems: the lack of social navigation support (utilising other people's experiences) and the challenge of making user-generated content (UGC) useful. In this article, some collective intelligence-based route recommendation methods are designed to address these problems. The proposed methods can make use of UGC (reflecting other users’ navigation experiences), and provide users with the least complex and the length-complexity-optimised (LCO) routes. Some simulations using the street network of the first district of Vienna (Austria) are designed to evaluate the proposed methods. The results show that compared to the shortest route, the collective intelligence-based routes (i.e. the least complex and the LCO routes) have a significant improvement of the route quality (with lower complexity ratings), thereby more effectively supporting users’ navigation tasks (more chances of reaching the destination, fewer mistakes made and shorter distance travelled).