Hermann Georg Mayer

Influence of Emissions on Pedestrian Evacuation

Emissions like fire, smoke, noxious gases etc. have a crucial impact on the evacuation of large buildings in case of an emergency. Given static egress plans, the predefined escape route might be blocked by any of these emissions. Since the exact location of an emission is not known during planning stage, it is not possible to include this phenomenon into static egress plans. However, if the building is equipped with an adequate selection of detectors and sensors, egress plans can be dynamically adapted during an emergency. Optimal escape routes are calculated by a pedestrian simulation. The results of the simulation will be communicated to the occupants (by means of dynamic signage, hand-held devices, voice evacuation).

Guideline for crowd evacuation simulation validation of a pedestrian simulator with RiMEA test scenarios

This paper introduces a way to verify a microscopic pedestrian simulator. The microscopic pedestrian simulator tested in this paper is developed by our group, which can be used to guide the crowd evacuation and prepare respond plans for emergent situations as reference to city council and law enforcement agency. It is important that the simulation results reveal the true behavior of pedestrian, for certain precaution actions can be taken in order to guarantee the safety of the crowd. Therefore, the simulator has to been tested and verified using different test scenarios. In this paper, we documented the performance of our simulator tested with all 14 scenarios proposed by the RiMEA (Richtlinie für Mikroskopische Entfluchtungs-Analysen) guideline. The test results show that our simulator passes all the tests. Moreover, our pedestrian simulator constantly improves its performance by cooperating with construction companies and government departments running on-site tests with first-hand data. Now it covers emergency scenarios such as fire / smoke and floods.

Digitalization of Legacy Building Data - Preparation of Printed Building Plans for the BIM Process.

Today, preparing existing building plans for a 3D BIM (building information modelling) process is a tedious work involving lots of manual steps. Even if the data is already in a digitized and vectorised format, the lack of semantics often prevents the data from being processed in automated workflows. However, the requirements for simulation tasks, which are relevant for brown-field projects, are not too demanding regarding the level of detail. In most cases (e.g. optimized placement of fire safety equipment, evacuation planning, daylighting simulation etc.), only information about spaces and their interconnections are needed. If coefficients for the heat-transfer between spaces can be added, also energy simulations can be performed. Therefore the goal of this work is to provide a basic standardized building model, which can be derived from all sorts of legacy data (different CAD formats and styles and even scanned plans). Also basic semantics will be added to the data, which complements the definitions of the BIM standard used in this work. Based on the models, building simulation can be enabled as a cheap surplus service, promoting the usage of cloud implementation of the BIM process.

Automatic Validation for Crowd Simulation: Test Suite for a Pedestrian Simulator Based on Different Scenarios

Evacuation simulation and especially the determination of evacuation times is a very complex task. Moreover the prognosis of place and time of critical bottlenecks within the building during the evacuation is critical due to complex building structures and the correct pedestrian behavior. Therefore, an extensive validation and calibration of the simulation algorithms is an indispensable requirement for every simulation tool. An automatic test suite for different scenarios will facilitate this task yielding in proven, automated and reproducible results. The microscopic pedestrian simulator tested in this paper is developed by our group. The tool can be used to guide the crowd evacuation and prepare respond plans for emergent situations as reference to city council and law enforcement agency. It is important that the simulation results reveal the true behavior of pedestrian; for certain precaution actions can be taken in order to guarantee the safety of the crowd.

Waiting Zones for Real Life Scenarios: A Case Study Using a German Railway Station as an Example

Simulations of pedestrian dynamics aim to reproduce and predict the natural behaviour of pedestrians in different situations. In most models it is assumed that pedestrians constantly walk towards their destinations. Here we investigate the legitimacy of this assumption using data, collected during a field experiment and obtained from analysis of video recordings, at a major German railway station. Our observations suggest that a substantial proportion of people stand at certain locations for some time. In order to reproduce the observed behaviour adequately, we enhance an existing cellular automata framework with a new element to model standing persons, the so called waiting zones. Through simulations, we demonstrate how standing persons influence the overall dynamics. We also analyse how the developed model can be used for analysis of critical situations.