Shuji Kakegawa

A Study on Evacuation Simulation after Earthquake in Consumer Facilities

This study attempted to re-create the impact of evacuation obstacles such as moved or tipped furniture and scattered goods on peoples evacuation behavior in a building at the time of an earthquake in an evacuation simulation. We conducted an earthquake evacuation simulation of the time required to complete evacuation and evacuation behavior with simulation conditions based on the information obtained through the interviews with representatives of four consumer facilities which actually suffered damage from an earthquake, focusing on peoples behavior both when the building was shaking and after the earthquake, the reaction of staff, damage inside the building and evacuation behavior in order to seek the impact of damage inside the building, assuming the tipped or moved furniture and scattered goods would partially block an evacuation route and thus cause a reduction in walking speed. As a result, a phenomenon that people are crowded into sales spaces and passageways causing a traffic jam was re-created on the assumption that evacuation obstacles such as furniture and goods would slow down walking speed.

Review of A Real Multi-story Store Fire by Applying Evacuation and Smoke Movement Interactive Simulation Model

The evacuation and smoke movement interactive simulation model has been developed to handle the evacuation of large populations of individuals with mixed walking capabilities. The advantages of the model are: 1) to handle evacuation of individual evacuees considering variety of behavioral parameters, 2) to handle total evacuation in a multi-story building via the stairs, and 3) to consider interactions between egress behavior and spread of smoke in a building. The system is a deterministic simulation program implemented by the agent-based computer language, Repast. Using this simulation model, we conducted case studies to reproduce the smoke condition and evacuation situation of a real fatal fire of the 1990 Nagasakiya-Amagasaki Store Fire as accurately as possible reflecting the facts from the survey. The calculated results of case studies well agreed with the investigated pattern of risk in evacuation behavior linked with the smoke impacts by the model. We also demonstrated that our simulation model is useful enough to examine possible changes of consequences according to different egress scenarios in order to find possible future issues and solutions for the problems regarding the total evacuation in a multi-story building.