Emergency Evacuation Simulation In Urban Residential Communities Based On Pre-evacuation Time Prediction

The timely and secure evacuation of an urban residential community is crucial to residents’ safety when emergency events happen.This is different to evacuation of office spaces or schools,emergency evacuation in residential communities must consider the pre-evacuation behaviors and the influence of pre-evacuation time during evacuation.To evacuate residents safely,it is necessary to model when conducting an evacuation analysis when the space to be analyzed is particularly complex.Now,there are many simulation software.However,regardless of the software used,it’s necessary to establish modelling parameter,which can have a significant impact on the overall results.Thus,a new method of evacuation simulation is introduced in this paper to solve issues discussed above.It integrates the study of residents’ pre-evacuation time and simulation,which can estimate pre-evacuation times by actual performance to conduct emergency evacuation simulation in urban residential communities.This method obtains the structure of the buildings by in by investigation and the residents’ preevacuation behavior data by surveys at first.Then,building a predictive model to predict pre-evacuation time among different residents.Meanwhile,evacuation simulations taking indoor and outdoor as three-dimensional integration will be conduct to study the evacuation produce of study area,which makes the result of evacuation simulation in urban residential communities more realistic.In order to get an understanding of the critical parameters,a sensitivity analysis is also conducted to find the critical parameters in evacuation simulations.The parameters include walking speed,shoulder width,acceleration time,distance to obstacles,comfortable distance,and comfortable distance from queue density,persist time and collision response time.To understand the weight of each parameter,it is necessary to calculate the sensitivity index to express the degree of influence.Compared with traditional simulation methods,the proposed method could get better simulation results,which realizes three-dimensional evacuation simulation integrated indoor and outdoor.The key of this method is micro-scale simulation and analysis of pre-evacuation time estimation in different kinds of residents in urban residential communities.A case study in Luoshanqicun Community,Pudong New District,Shanghai,China,was conducted to demonstrate the feasibility of the proposed method.The simulation is closer to actual evacuation situations.The results of evacuation simulations in different scenarios of whether to consider pre-evacuation time or not can be compared to identify potential evacuation problems and propose some optimization solutions.The simulation results showed that the pre-evacuation time have significant impacts on the simulation procedure,including the total evacuation time,the sensitivity of parameters,the flow rates of residents at exits and the crowd density on roads(the congestion time and the congestion degree).The simulation process is close to the actual evacuation situation and this study can help to gain a deeper understanding of residents’ evacuation under emergencies,especially the influence of pre-evacuation time on evacuation produce,which improves emergency managements of urban communities.