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The automatic flap barrier gate system (AFBGS) plays a critical role in building security, but it is more vulnerable to natural hazards than common exits (including power failure, due to earthquakes, and delayed evacuation, due to safety certification, etc.). This article considers a dynamic decision-making process of evacuees during post-earthquake evacuation near an AFBGS. An interesting metaphor, broken windows (BW), is utilized to interpret people’s actual behavior during evacuation. A multi-stage decision-making mechanism of evacuees is developed to characterize the instantaneous transition among three defined stages: Habitual, mild, and radical states. Then, we build a modified three-layer social force model to reproduce the interaction between evacuees based on an actual post-earthquake evacuation. The simulations reveal that BW provides a contextualized understanding of emergency evacuation with a similar effect to the traditional metaphor. An earlier appearance of a mild rule breaker leads to a higher crowd evacuation efficiency. If evacuees maintain the state of broken windows behavior (BWB), the crowd evacuation efficiency can be improved significantly. Contrary to the criminological interpretation, the overall effect of mild BWB is positive, but the radical BWB is encouraged under the command of guiders.
Yu Song; Jia Liu; Qian Liu. Dynamic Decision-Making Process of Evacuees during Post-Earthquake Evacuation near an Automatic Flap Barrier Gate System: A Broken Windows Perspective. Sustainability 2021, 13, 8771 .
AMA StyleYu Song, Jia Liu, Qian Liu. Dynamic Decision-Making Process of Evacuees during Post-Earthquake Evacuation near an Automatic Flap Barrier Gate System: A Broken Windows Perspective. Sustainability. 2021; 13 (16):8771.
Chicago/Turabian StyleYu Song; Jia Liu; Qian Liu. 2021. "Dynamic Decision-Making Process of Evacuees during Post-Earthquake Evacuation near an Automatic Flap Barrier Gate System: A Broken Windows Perspective." Sustainability 13, no. 16: 8771.
In recent years, the emergence of terrorist attacks all over the world has endangered public security seriously and caused many civilian casualties. The goal of this paper is to develop a general approach for studying the defensive scheme of security guards and reducing civilian casualties in a terrorist attack. When artificial attacks occur in an enclosed public place, pedestrians try to avoid terrorists and escape from the room, security guards want to fight against terrorists and protect pedestrians, but terrorists aim to kill other agents quickly. The new approach consists of two parts. First, a modified social force model is built to simulate the crowd movement of all agents. Second, a novel algorithm is proposed to simulate the process of the fights between security guards and terrorists. Then several defensive strategies and spatial position schemes are proposed for security guards and they are compared and analyzed through computer simulations. It is found that security guards may be more of a hindrance than a help for pedestrians in some cases. Only an appropriate defensive scheme can reduce the number of civilian deaths significantly in terrorist attacks. Furthermore, the positions of security guards within the room should not be too concentrated at the center or too scattered at the corners in the daily work. A moderately scattered position scheme of security guards established beforehand will save civilian lives effectively in terrorist attacks. Our study provides valuable insights to the counterterrorism emergency management.
Qian Liu. A social force approach for the defensive strategy of security guards in a terrorist attack. International Journal of Disaster Risk Reduction 2020, 46, 101605 .
AMA StyleQian Liu. A social force approach for the defensive strategy of security guards in a terrorist attack. International Journal of Disaster Risk Reduction. 2020; 46 ():101605.
Chicago/Turabian StyleQian Liu. 2020. "A social force approach for the defensive strategy of security guards in a terrorist attack." International Journal of Disaster Risk Reduction 46, no. : 101605.
A social force model is proposed in this paper to study the effect of dedicated exit on the evacuation of heterogeneous pedestrians in a public place. In this model, pedestrians are divided into two groups—powerful pedestrians and weak pedestrians, who have different walking abilities. Several exit design schemes are compared through simulations in a regular room. The main results are: (1) Building a new exit as weak group’s dedicated exit can simultaneously reduce each group’s average evacuation time and maximum evacuation time. (2) Reconstructing an existing ordinary exit as weak group’s dedicated exit can reduce weak pedestrians’ average evacuation time but may increase their maximum evacuation time. (3) If the total number of exits is fixed, compared with the non-dedicated exit scheme, the scheme which designs dedicated exits for each group separately may reduce weak group’s evacuation speed. (4) If the sum of widths of all the exits is fixed, the ratio of width between the dedicated exit and the ordinary exit has a significant effect on each group’s evacuation. The optimal ratio depends on the proportion of weak pedestrians. Finally, a real-world example which involves the evacuation issue in a waiting hall with security checkpoints is used to show the effectiveness of women-only exits in improving the crowd evacuation efficiency. Particularly, it is found that a suitable women-only exit scheme can achieve a win-win situation for both male pedestrians and female pedestrians in the crowd evacuation.
Qian Liu. The effect of dedicated exit on the evacuation of heterogeneous pedestrians. Physica A: Statistical Mechanics and its Applications 2018, 506, 305 -323.
AMA StyleQian Liu. The effect of dedicated exit on the evacuation of heterogeneous pedestrians. Physica A: Statistical Mechanics and its Applications. 2018; 506 ():305-323.
Chicago/Turabian StyleQian Liu. 2018. "The effect of dedicated exit on the evacuation of heterogeneous pedestrians." Physica A: Statistical Mechanics and its Applications 506, no. : 305-323.