viveca jiménez - save me: supporting mass evacuation guidance within public transport environments...

Supporting Mass Evacuation Guidance within Public Transport Environments during a Disaster Event

Viveca Jiménez Mixco [email protected]

Universidad Politécnica de Madrid December 2011

Motivation…

1-2 December, Valencia, WTHS’11

The whole world has experienced some type of disaster event within the last years. Not

only natural phenomena, like the earthquake in Turkey in the past months, but also man-made disasters, like terrorist attacks, have affected wide areas and produced severe

personal and material damages.

Motivation…

During an emergency situation, all the involved individuals and rescue teams need to be enabled to react immediately, in order to allow for a quick

and secure evacuation of the area.

This is especially critical when the event occurs within a closed environment, where travellers are likely to become trapped and/or injured and thus

dependent on rapid medical assistance.

This implies that: 1) Rescuers need precise information on the situation, seamless communication means

between themselves and the operations centre and proper guidance to the location of the trapped travellers, and

2) All travellers, including children, elderly and disabled need appropriate guidance to be

able to escape from the affected area

1-2 December 2011, Valencia, WTHS’11

Introduction


SAVE ME aims at:

-detecting natural and man-made disaster events in public transport infrastructure

and

- actively supporting life saving activities by facilitating both the self-rescue of the

travellers as well as the rescue work done by fire fighters.

Particular emphasis is put on the most

vulnerable travelers: children, elderly and the disabled.

SAVE ME Methodology

Detailed analysis of the different target groups, key transportation environments and disaster events

Stakeholders and users needs extraction

Benchmarking on relevant technologies, algorithms and policies

Study on influence of panic and stress

Definition of the system


Human Factors: Panic & Stress

Studies on past emergency situations, have shown that the majority of the people acted with calm. Furthermore, people

are actually acting especially pro-social, when confronted with a dangerous situation.

This counts especially for groups that have a strong

cohesion.

However, there are cases in which masses of people show irrational or anti-social behavior. These phenomena are widely known under the term of “mass panic” but there are some important influence factors we need to know in order to successfully avoid them.

People show anti-social behaviour when they feel they are in a competitive situation and so they

need to fight with others in order to escape Bad front-to-back communication leads to anti-social behaviour


Human Factors: Panic & Stress (II)

Stress is an important factor that leads people’s actions in an emergency situation. It can be defined as a physiological reaction of the human body to a threat.

High stress can reduce rational and planned behavior, and lead to more instinctive behavior. The stress level of an individual is difficult to predict.

Stress is not only a negative mental status. A medium stress level is necessary for optimum performance. Some people unnecessarily delay self-rescue in order to complete unimportant tasks (such as collecting personal items before leaving), pondering too long about alternative escape paths and slow walking.

This also applies to emergency situations and thus, in some situations, the user interfaces should rather raise than lower the users’ stress levels.


Technical Approaches- Basic Technology

Communication is critical during an emergency and needs to be addressed thoroughly within the disaster-response plan.

The communication challenges include: 1. Reaching people in different locations with

different devices quickly and simultaneously 2. Providing the right message 3. Monitoring delivery and response 4. Ensuring that the process is initiated and

suspended at the right times.

The project will use automated-notification technology, which is a very effective method of rapidly distributing information to large numbers of people in a crisis. Users will be pre-registered to the system An application will be preinstalled in the user’s device in order to enable the automated communication.


SAVE ME components


SAVE ME Detection system


◘ The proposed detection and communication system consists of: 1. A wireless sensor network

(WSN) grid 2. A telecommunication

module that allows transmission of these data to the operators centre and travellers’ and rescuers’ devices, even under adverse conditions.

SAVE ME Decision support system and simulation models


◘ The DSS processes the info from the Detection system and the simulation module to provide personalized and group wise routing for the people detected in the area.

SAVE ME Intelligent agents for personalisation


◘ Software entities that perform reasoning and make decisions in order to provide personalised services to the users. 1. User profile agents 2. Sensor agents 3. Decision support agents 4. Emergency notification

agents 5. Service Agents

SAVE ME training and guidance system


◘ The objective of this module is to enable the correct training of operators of the emergency response platform, but also to assess its operation under simulated emergency scenarios.

SAVE ME Emergency support interfaces


◘ Graphical, acoustical and haptic user interfaces to support appropriate human interaction in emergency conditions

Telecommunication Infrastructure

◘ To be effective, the SAVE ME crisis-communication plan provides a high-fault tolerance level, anticipating and overcoming potential obstacles such as power outages and downed phone lines.

◘ The objective is to enable continuous operation, reliable and safe through the whole process of events detection, i.e. from sensor detection to the emergency centre and user’s devices.

◘ Fault tolerant principles: 1. Redundancy, 2. Replication 3. Diversity


Module description


Module description


No ROUTER HARDWARE COMPONENTS Element Description

1 PC A PC, equipped and configured specifically for the SAVE ME TI

2 Wireless PCI Card (IEEE 802. 11 b/g/n)

One is configured as access point, for the communication between the router and the user’s mobile device. The other is configured in ad-hoc mode, for the communication among routers.

1 Bluetooth Card To support BT communication between router and mobile device.

Main features of the infrastructure

Ad-hoc wireless network composed by routers able to manage Bluetooth with pre-installed and automatic upgradable emergency software.

Wi-Fi and Bluetooth communication supported Wi-Fi: router-router, router-mobile device Bluetooth: router-mobile device

Automatic recalibration in case of node failure or collapse Routing protocol B.A.T.M.A.N used for this strategy

Designed following the main features of the fault-tolerance to assure: Redundancy in order to provide 99.99% availability Efficient spatially location to cover the failure of other routers

Routers able to provide a static evacuation plan to entrapped users in case of failure of other SAVE ME components


Interaction with other SAVE Me components

€€€ -The user is pre-registered to the application -The user must download and install the application -Travelers use a mobile phone -Rescuers have their own PDA

Detection system and Decision Support System

€€€ -The TI will inform the Control Centre about the type of emergency

Telecommunication Infrastructure

Traveler/Rescuer personal device Control Centre Computer

€€€ -The Router provides Bluetooth and Wi-Fi communication -Ad-hoc mode is used for communication between router-router -Access point mode is used for communication between router-mobile device

€€€ -The Decision support system activates the “emergency mode” of the Telecommunication Infrastructure when there is an emergency event -The information handled during the emergency is sent through the TI, from sensor detection to travelers, rescuers and operator support system


Evaluation

◘ SAVE ME will undergo two different pilot tests: ◘ NEXUS metro network of Newcastle:

◘ Disperse the people successfully to the various remaining escape routes

◘ Gotthard-Tunnel ◘ Inform and convince the people traveling in the cars that they need to exit their

cars and head towards the nearest shelter room


Conclusion

Mass evacuation becomes very challenging during an emergency situation, especially when the event occurs in a closed environment such as transport hubs, road tunnels or metro stations.

Appropriate guidance for a variety of users (travelers, rescue personnel involved in the active mitigation of the event and operators in the control centre of the traffic infrastructure) is essential in these types of situations.

In order to optimize the life-saving process in emergency situations, tools and more comprehensive models are required to study and predict the user’s behavior. A well-prepared system can significantly reduce the impacts of an attack.

Mobile device based guidance, able to provide personalized instructions to the users, has a strong potential to face this issue. The most promising possibilities rely on the integration of different modalities in order to reach the broadest possible range of users, including the most vulnerable ones, for example, combining the mobile rescue guidance with intelligent infrastructure signaling.


Conclusion

9-14 July 2011, Hilton Orlando Bonnet Creek, Orlando, Florida, USA

The SAVE ME Telecommunication Infrastructure provides consistent replication of the emergency

information and is able to communicate and inform directly the user.

After being fully integrated with the other modules and sub-systems of the SAVE ME infrastructure, the

Telecommunication module will be tested in the two Pilot sites of the project.

The tests performed in the pilot sites will assess reliability, usability, user acceptance, economic and

safety/security impacts of the whole system.

Acknowledgment

This work has been partially funded by the European Union in the context of the SAVE ME project (SST-2008- 234027), coordinated by the University of Newcastle Upon

Tyne. The project started in 1st October 2009, and has a duration of 36 months. The consortium is composed of the following partners: UNEW, CERTH, SIMUDYNE, CNVVF,

IES, COAT, GST, MIZAR, USTUTT, UNIMORE and UPM.


Supporting Mass Evacuation Guidance within Public Transport Environments during a Disaster Event

Viveca Jiménez Mixco [email protected]

Universidad Politécnica de Madrid December 2011

viveca jiménez - save me: supporting mass evacuation guidance within public transport environments...

Health & Medicine