Resilience

The project develops a Cellular Automata (CA) model and associated

prototype software for the simulation of environmentally-constrained and

managed pedestrian motion during normal times and during emergency

situations that result in evacuations. The model captures naturally

occurring interactions involving the environment, the pedestrians, physical

constraints, emergency constraints, and the evacuation policies and

controls that a management authority would attempt to implement.

From a social science perspective it is useful to think of evacuation

behavior during emergencies as having three distinct analytical

dimensions: the physical environment being evacuated, the managerial

policies and controls deployed at evacuation, and the psychological and

social organizational factors impacting the people present during the

emergency. It is much more common in the physics and engineering

literature to find consideration of the first two dimensions than of the third.

The proposed study addresses the essence, and the interactions, of all

three dimensions of the pedestrian evacuation problem to predict the

course of events following the enactment of specified evacuation policies

and controls.

The project results will be interpreted in light of accumulated knowledge on

the sociology of disasters, allowing for the provision, to local and federal

government agencies as well as private organizations, of a useful blueprint

to follow during crisis evacuations. This provision of guidance is an

important benefit to society, as it improves disaster response programs at

the local, state and federal levels. The need for a social science study of

crisis evacuation is particularly keen nowadays as terrorist threats have

increased. Project conduct entails the training of graduate and

undergraduate students in the mastery of analysis approaches and the

participation of female and minority faculty in science. Project results

further facilitate consideration of evacuation in the design phase of

architectural, engineering, and urban design studies. (T. F. Greene Airport

in Providence, Rhode Island, is the proposed simulation test-bed. The

Rhode Island Airport Corporation vouches for its strong support of the

proposed effort and anticipates using the derived simulation software.)