Citation

Wang S, Cheng W, Deng Y, Hou J. Safety Sci. 2020; 122: e104506.

Copyright

(Copyright © 2020, Elsevier Publishing)

DOI

10.1016/j.ssci.2019.09.029

PMID

unavailable

Abstract

In an emergency, evacuation warnings are normally communicated by Police or Fire personnel. However, in addition to communications from emergency personnel, warnings are also communicated by the evacuees themselves. Because of the limited resources of emergency personnel, efficient communication of warnings by evacuees themselves is important for improving warning communication in evacuations. To efficiently improve warning communication among evacuees, we propose an enforced strategy. The essential idea of the proposed strategy is to request the initially warned evacuees to communicate the warning to the evacuees who have few connections in the crowd. To examine the validity of the proposed strategy, a warning communication model was built based on Multi-Agent Modelling, and 20 Monte Carlo experiments were conducted in 10 complex networks. The experimental results demonstrated the validity of the proposed strategy. It differs from other strategies in that the warning communication efficiency can be improved in the whole process of warning when using the proposed strategy. The proposed enforced strategy can be widely and efficiently applied to improve warning communications among evacuees in evacuations for real emergencies or emergency drills. Furthermore, the proposed strategy can also be employed to improve the efficiency of communications among emergency personnel, commanders, or officers in an emergency.

Language: en

Keywords

Complex network; Evacuation; Multi-agent modelling; Strategy; Warning communication