• Journal of Information Processing Systems
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• v.16 no.6
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• pp.1309-1323
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• 2020

Crowd evacuation simulation is an important research issue for designing reasonable building layouts and planning more effective evacuation routes. The social force model (SFM) is an important pedestrian movement model, and is widely used in crowd evacuation simulations. The model can effectively simulate crowd evacuation behaviors in a simple scene, but for a multi-obstacle scene, the model could result in some undesirable problems, such as pedestrian evacuation trajectory oscillation, pedestrian stagnation and poor evacuation routing. This paper analyzes the causes of these problems and proposes an improved SFM for complex multi-obstacle scenes. The new model adds navigation points and walking shortest route principles to the SFM. Based on the proposed model, a crowd evacuation simulation system is developed, and the crowd evacuation simulation was carried out in various scenes, including some with simple obstacles, as well as those with multi-obstacles. Experiments show that the pedestrians in the proposed model can effectively bypass obstacles and plan reasonable evacuation routes.

• Journal of the Korean Society of Surveying, Geodesy, Photogrammetry and Cartography
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• v.39 no.5
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• pp.265-278
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• 2021

When a dangerous event arises for people inside a building and an immediate evacuation is required, it is important that suitable routes have been previously defined. These situations can happen especially when buildings are crowded, making the occupants have a very high vulnerability and can be trapped if they do not evacuate quickly and safely. However, in most cases, routes are considered based just on their proximity or short distance to the exit areas, and evacuation simulations that include more variables are not performed. This work aims to propose a methodology for building's indoor evacuation activities under the premise of processing simulation scenarios in multi-agent environments. In the methodology, importance indexes of simplified and validated geometry data from a BIM (Building Information Modeling) are considered as heuristic input data in a proposed algorithm. The algorithm is based on AP-Theta^* pathfinding and collision avoidance machine learning techniques. It also includes conditioning variables such as the number of people, speed of movement as well as reaction ability of the agents that influence the evacuation times. Moreover, collision avoidance is applied between people or with objects along the route. The simulations using the proposed algorithm are tested in NetLogo for diverse scenarios, showing feasible evacuation routes and calculating evacuation times in a multi-agent environment. The experimental results are obtained by applying the method in a study case and demonstrate the level of effectiveness of the algorithm, and the influence of the conditioning variables analyzed together when performing safe evacuation routes.

• Proceedings of the Korean Institute of Building Construction Conference
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• 2020.11a
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• pp.115-116
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• 2020

Recently, due to fires in high-rise residential and commercial buildings and apartments in Ulsan and Busan, the issue of evacuation safety in the event of a building fire is being closely watched. In the evacuation safety design for these building fires, it is important to secure evacuation routes considering the spatial characteristics of the building or the characteristics of the occupants and to take measures to protect the evacuation routes in order to ensure the safety of the occupants in the event of a fire. Although simulation is mainly used in Korea to assess the safety of evacuation, there is a big difference in that the Building Standards Act provides tools that can be calculated more than simulation in neighboring Japan. In addition to the evaluation method, which is called the "Building Law Assessment Methods" in Japan, the research team considered that it is important to know the process of evaluation in future domestic research, and investigated the contents of the evaluation process and wanted to apply it first to domestic buildings in the future.

• 한국방재학회:학술대회논문집
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• 2008.02a
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• pp.221-223
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• 2008

It is the best way that to make an inundation map and distribute it to inhabitants for the purpose of decreasing damage of tsunami. To make an inundation map, tsunami which broughthuge damage to Korea should be properly investigated and maximum inundation zonewas selected by simulating tsunami phenomenan. An inundation map must involve the location of shelters and evacuation routes. New evacuation simulation program connected evacuation simulation procedure and tsunami inundation procedure to get inhabitants' evacuation states in real-time.

• Proceedings of the Korea Contents Association Conference
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• 2012.05a
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• pp.193-194
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• 2012

Most of the Historic Preservation Areas are very weak to fire disasters. The aim of this study is to build a proposal-scheme for evacuation routes planning at a large-scale disaster in a historic preservation area. The study area is a preservation area called "Hizen-Hama-Shuku" which has many straw-roofed wooden houses in Kashima city, Japan. To achieve this aim, outline of the scheme is discussed. The proposal-scheme of evacuation routes consists of objectives to propose, target time to evacuate for the refuge place, evaluation method, and procedures. The existing condition and the measures are evaluated using the software "SimTread".

• Journal of the Korean Institute of Rural Architecture
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• v.7 no.3
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• pp.93-100
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• 2005

The purpose of this study is to investigate specific crowding areas resulted from diverse physical factors of multi-plex theaters in a fire evacuation, and more accurately predict the evacuation route of people. To achieve these purpose, the architectural characteristics of three multi-plex theaters in Jinju have been chosen, and the evacuation experiments through the computer simulation called Simulex were carried out for each on the these theaters. The conclusions from this study are as follows: (1) Crowding usually happens cross areas between theater inside and corridors, and Crowding rate depending on the number of cross areas. (2) It is necessary to design the escape routes being employed ordinary times. And the egress routes planning should be integrated into space programming at the early stage of building design.

• International conference on construction engineering and project management
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• 2009.05a
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• pp.864-868
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• 2009

Fire safety management on any construction site should start with recognizing fire risks in the workplace, understanding the extent of the risks, and proper assessment of the controls necessary to reduce the risks. However, the most important step to prevent fire-related accidents on jobsites is the constant review and monitoring of processes and controls by all individuals involved. This study was conducted to analyze the effectiveness of using computer simulation as an addition to maps or floor plans in safety training and management. Simulex was used on a real project to model various egress routes and to identify potential problem areas of the evacuation strategy. This study highlights the efficacy of simulated emergency evacuation as a training tool that visually shows constantly altering means of egress.

• International Journal of High-Rise Buildings
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• v.11 no.3
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• pp.227-240
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• 2022

Under the Korean Enforcement Decree of the Building Act, all high story apartment houses more than 5 stories high are mandated to install a fire evacuation system to ensure safe evacuation from fire accidents and providing quick and easy bidirectional escape route when main entrance is blocked by flame or toxic smoke. However, the current fire evacuation system shows a lack of understanding from residents and thus is widely ignored for having insufficient safety functions, especially vis-à-vis fire emergencies. Studies have found that an alternative evacuation method, the escapable fire evacuation system, has been analyzed for safety evaluation compared with the conventional passive fire escape system and can bring efficient and safer solutions, providing high rise residents escape from fire accidents. Evaluation for safety evacuation has been performed by the Fire Dynamics Simulation and applying Pathfinder simulation. This resulted in providing appropriate escape routes within the safety escape time and allowed for people in high rise building fires to get to safety.

• Journal of the Korean Society of Surveying, Geodesy, Photogrammetry and Cartography
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• v.37 no.5
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• pp.303-313
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• 2019

After a disaster happens in urban areas, many people need support for a quick evacuation. This work aims to develop a method for the calculation of the most feasible evacuation route inside buildings. In the methodology we simplify the geometry of the structural and non structural elements from the BIM (Building Information Modeling) to store them in a spatial database which follows standards to support vector data. Then, we apply the multicriteria analysis with the allocation of prioritization values and weight factors validated through the AHP (Analytic Hierarchy Process), in order to obtain the Importance Index S(n) of the elements. The criteria consider security conditions and distribution of the building's facilities. The S(n) is included as additional heuristic data for the calculation of the evacuation route through an algorithm developed as a variant of the $A^*$ pathfinding, The experimental results in the simulation of evacuation scenarios for vulnerable people in healthy physical conditions and for the elderly group, shown that the conditions about the wide of routes, restricted areas, vulnerable elements, floor roughness and location of facilities in the building applied in the multicriteria analysis has a high influence on the processing of the developed variant of $A^*$ algorithm. The criteria modify the evacuation route, because they considers as the most feasible route, the safest instead of the shortest, for the simulation of evacuation scenarios for people in healthy physical conditions. Likewise, they consider the route with the location of facilities for the movement of the elderly like the most feasible in the simulation of evacuation route for the transit of the elderly group. These results are important for the assessment of the decision makers to select between the shortest or safest route like the feasible for search and rescue activities.

• Proceedings of the Korean Institute of Navigation and Port Research Conference
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• 2023.05a
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• pp.132-133
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• 2023

The safe evacuation of people during disasters is of utmost importance. Various life safety evacuation simulation tools have been developed and implemented, with most relying on algorithms that analyze maps to extract the shortest path and guide agents along predetermined routes. While effective in predicting evacuation routes in stable disaster conditions and short timeframes, this approach falls short in dynamic situations where disaster scenarios constantly change. Existing algorithms struggle to respond to such scenarios, prompting the need for a more adaptive evacuation route algorithm that can respond to changing disasters. Artificial intelligence technology based on reinforcement learning holds the potential to develop such an algorithm. As a fundamental step in algorithm development, this study aims to evaluate whether an evacuation algorithm developed by reinforcement learning satisfies the performance conditions of the evacuation simulation tool required by IMO MSC.1/Circ1533.