Technological Advances in Evacuation Planning and Emergency Management: Current State of the Art


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CAIT project no.: EVAC RU4474

Fiscal Year: 2002/2003

Status: Final

Rutgers-CAIT Author(s): Mohsen Jafari, Izzat Bakhadyrov, Ali Maher

Sponsor(s): USDOT

Summary:

Evacuation of people in the event of hazard is one of basic problems of human society. From early ages people planned their habitat with possibility of hazards in mind. For instance, one of The Seven Wonders of the World, the Temple of Artemis, was built on a swamp, to protect it and its personnel from earthquakes often in that area. With the course of history, complexity of human built buildings and infrastructures grew, as well as a population density. This increased the dangers imposed by any hazard, occurring in densely populated areas, and imposed higher requirements on evacuation and emergency management. Nowadays, evacuation planning and emergency management became a sophisticated field of civil engineering sciences, aimed to save human lives by safe facility design and optimization of rescue operations. To do so, it uses latest achievements in number of various both fundamental and applied disciplines, such as Simulation, Process Control, Applied Mathematics, Psychology, Architecture, Physics and many others. In this work we attempt to present a survey of various approaches and technologies, being developed and being used for Evacuation Planning and Emergency Management.