Simulation modelling is a necessary tool to analyse pedestrian movement behaviour in order to predict the social and collective behaviour in different situations. Psychological aspects of human behaviour in interacting with the environment is the critical point in the pedestrian simulation context. The affordance theory originated from psychology and humanities is a key concept to address this issue and model the relationship between an agent and his/her environment. This study aims to introduce a prototype of an agent-based model using the affordance concept to simulate the decision-making process during an evacuation. The proposed approach was tested to model the behaviour of evacuees in a platform of a subway station through both normal and emergencies. The results of the test including the evacuation time and flows toward different scenarios, showed that the model can work properly. The proposed approach can yield a useful tool for designers to mention pedestrian movement behaviour in their building designs.
5 December 2018 in International Journal of Injury Control and Safety Promotion
Road traffic accidents are critical public issue in developing countries, and they annually waste a significant amount of Gross Domestic Product (GDP). In order to urgently consider how this problem is related to the current policies, a proper safety evaluation of regional programmes in crash reduction is fundamental to the governments. The current research aims to employ a double-frontier Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) model to assess the productivity of Iranian regional safety programmes in reducing the number of road fatalities. The safety efficiencies of Iranian provinces are simultaneously estimated using the double frontier DEA to reflect both the optimistic and pessimistic points of view. Then, the Evidential Reasoning (ER) approach is applied to aggregate the obtained efficiency values. These provinces are ranked based on the data panel for 2014–2016. Finally, a double-frontier Malmquist productivity index (MPI) is used to comprehensively measure the safety performance of Iranian roads over a period of time.