Managing egress of crowd during infrastructure disruption

• Main Authors: TENG, Teck Hou, CHENG, Shih-Fen, TRUONG, Trong-Nghia, LAU, Hoong Chuin
• Format: text
• Language: English
• Published: Institutional Knowledge at Singapore Management University 2016
• Subjects: Convention center; Egress time; Emergency situation; Indoor environment; Investigate effects; Operational conditions; Artificial Intelligence and Robotics; Computer Sciences; Operations Research, Systems Engineering and Industrial Engineering
• Online Access: https://ink.library.smu.edu.sg/sis_research/3336; https://ink.library.smu.edu.sg/context/sis_research/article/4338/viewcontent/managingEgress.pdf
• Institution: Singapore Management University

In a large indoor environment such as a sports arena or convention center, smooth egress of crowd after an event can be seriously affected if infrastructure such as elevators and escalators break down. In this paper, we propose a novel crowd simulator known as SIM-DISRUPT for simulating egress scenarios in non-emergency situations. To surface the impact of disrupted infrastructure on the egress of crowd, SIM-DISRUPT includes features that allow users to specify selective disruptions as well as strategies for controlling the distribution and egress choices of crowd. Using SIM-DISRUPT, we investigate effects of crowd distribution, egress choices and infrastructure disruptions on crowd egress time and measure efficacies of different egress strategies under various infrastructure disruption scenarios. A real-world inspired use case is used to demonstrate the usefulness of SIM-DISRUPT in planning egress under various operational conditions.