The terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and The Station nightclub fire have drawn new attention to the challenges of evacuating people from public buildings. Research being conducted at URI is studying how building evacuations occur with the aim toward providing insights that may serve to improve them.

The building evacuation research project began in 2002 with a grant from the National Science Foundation.  Led by Natacha Thomas, associate professor of civil and environmental engineering, it is designed to address the essence and the interactions of the pedestrian evacuation behavior through a multidisciplinary effort, which involves faculty members from sociology (Benigno Auguirre, of the University of Delaware), psychology (Charles Collyer), engineering (Natacha Thomas, Manbir Sodhi), and computer science (Joan Peckham, Jean-Yves Hervé). The project is being collaborated with the Disaster Research Center at University of Delaware, which conducts field and survey research on group, organizational and community preparation for, response to, and recovery from natural and technological disasters and other community-wide crises.

Building evacuation is the study of flow of pedestrians from a building in emergency situations. Dr. Thomas, who works in the area of traffic operation that facilitates flow of entities through transportation networks that include pedestrians, cyclists and vehicles, says, “ Evacuation depends on building design, evacuation plans that are implemented and the pedestrian behavior. We are looking closer into the behavior of pedestrians to predict what kind of actions they take during the emergency situation.”

Evacuation behavior during emergencies, commonly referred to as emergency egress, has three distinct analytical dimensions: the physical environment from which to evacuate, the managerial policies and controls deployed at evacuation, and the psychological and social organizational characteristics impacting the persons that participate in the movement. The project objective develops prototype software to simulate environmentally constrained and managed pedestrian motions during routine operations and emergency evacuations.

The social scientists on the team provide insights into the influence of the social organizational structure of pedestrians on their motion-choices. Engineers account for these motion-choices in the theoretical models of pedestrian dynamics constructed. Finally, computer scientists automate the capture and the analysis of pedestrian dynamics, and develop and encode simulation models of the derived pedestrian dynamics.

The undergraduate students involved in the project are engineering and computer science majors, with some double majoring in psychology-engineering and psychology-computer science. They include David Kurowski, Collin Lieberman, Lisa Ricci, Katharine Wray, Angel Castro and Elizete Fernandez. The graduate students are Kathy Jayko, Amadou Diallo, and Marc Schraffenberger. An Eisenhower Fellow from Puerto Rico, Maria Ray-Avila, joined the undergraduate research team this summer. URI Director of Safety and Risk Management J. Kevin Culley is an enthusiastic volunteer helping the investigators, as is a former URI student, Paul Holmes, who works for Addlight/Everglow.