Interactive analysis and visualization of situationally aware building evacuations. (July 2015)

• Record Type: Journal Article
• Authors: Guest, Jack; Eaglin, Todd; Subramanian, Kalpathi; Ribarsky, William
• Is Part Of: Information visualization. Volume 14:Number 3(2015:Jul.)
• Page Start: 204
• Page End: 222
• Publication Date: 2015-07
• Subjects: Evacuation -- visual analysis -- situational awareness -- emergency response; Information visualization -- Periodicals; 006.605
• DOI: 10.1177/1473871613516292
• Languages: English
• ISSNs: 1473-8716

Abstract

Evacuation of large urban structures, such as campus buildings, arenas, or stadiums, is of prime interest to emergency responders and planners. Although there is a large body of work on evacuation algorithms and their application, most of these methods are impractical to use in real-world scenarios (nonreal-time, for instance) or have difficulty handling scenarios with dynamically changing conditions. Our overall goal in this work is toward developing computer visualizations and real-time visual analytic tools for evacuations of large groups of buildings, and in the long term, integrate this with the street networks in the surrounding areas. A key aspect of our system is to provide situational awareness and decision support to first responders and emergency planners. In our earlier work, we demonstrated an evacuation system that employed a modified variant of a heuristic-based evacuation algorithm, which (1) facilitated real-time complex user interaction with first responder teams, in response to information received during the emergency; (2) automatically supported visual reporting tools for spatial occupancy, temporal cues, and procedural recommendations; and (3) multi-scale building models, heuristic evacuation models, and unique graph manipulation techniques for producing near real-time situational awareness. The system was tested in collaboration with our campus police and safety personnel, via a tabletop exercise consisting of three different scenarios. In this work, we have redesigned the system to be able to handle larger groups of buildings, in order to move toward a full-campus evacuation system. We demonstrate an evacuation simulation involving 22 buildings in the University of North Carolina, Charlotte campus. Second, the implementation has been redesigned as a WebGL application, facilitating easy dissemination and use by stakeholders.