PhD Studentship in Holistic modelling of evacuation in urban infrastructure systems

The safe and secure evacuation of the public following an unexpected shock event or disaster, affects a network, city or state’s welfare and resilience. Governments dedicate large amounts of resources to plan and prepare for the potential impacts of major disasters, which are extremely complex events, e.g. occurring in any number of incident combinations; potentially simultaneously at disparate locations. During an evacuation, there is also a need to consider both: frontline personnel of sectors, such as transportation, who are crucial to anticipating, monitoring and acting upon the onset of the disaster; and the first responder emergency services, e.g. fire and rescue services. Successful resilience planning requires consideration of these three groups. To assist planning, computer simulation models are widely used in the research and preparation for a vast array of emergencies to allocate resources. However, there are major problems with such models concerning both validity and usage. Evacuation simulation models suffer from their lack of flexibility and poor modelling of human behaviour, which restricts their recommendations from being utilised in developing improved evacuation procedures. Such models are used in isolated pockets, e.g. first responders undertake modelling in isolation considering their response times for incidents based upon experience and data without any consideration of how this will alter in exceptional or unique circumstances. There is therefore a need for a more holistic approach to understanding human behaviour during a disaster from front-line operators to the first responders. This will provide the relevant stakeholders with useful insights in disasters and subsequently facilitate planning for major emergencies. This is crucial towards maximising the efficiency and success of the evacuation process, which in turn is substantial for enhancing resilience. First, by ensuring that the current infrastructure is available/functional and thus able to support evacuation and manage the expected flows of evacuees. Second by guaranteeing that the responsible personnel, frontline and first responders, are able and have the means to coordinate these flows. Examples of this include how people and traffic flows expected to be experienced following a disaster may impact first responder’s ability to reach the scene of an incident and how the arrival or responders will then impact upon flow rates and people movements.

This research aims to initially develop the architecture of such a holistic model of evacuation. It will then further develop the data requirements for two case studies to test the holistic model in two different areas: an urban scenario in the UK and possibly in Asia. Cross-sectoral dependencies on the energy, transportation, healthcare, communications and water (and food) sectors will be considered. Once the architecture of the model has been validated, it will be tested on data will be collected from the two case studies.

The beneficiaries will range from national and local governments to first responders, industry and ultimately the public.