Safety of users in road evacuation: some enhancement in modelling pedestrian evacuation of a building

This paper concerns the simulation of pedestrian outflow related to the evacuation of a building, using flow models calibrated on the basis of data collected during some experimentation on a test site. Such experimentation was conducted in a primary school in an Italian town, and the adopted methodology can be applied to any building with homogeneous characteristics in terms of activities (i.e. offices, banks, shopping centres). Experimentation was carried out by the Laboratory for Transport Systems Analysis (LAST) of the Mediterranea University of Reggio Calabria (Italy) under a research project entitled SURE, whose general objective was risk reduction in urban areas, in terms of exposure, by defining and implementing evacuation procedures. One of the activities concerns the specification and calibration of a system of models able to simulate the transportation system when a population has to evacuate due to a forthcoming disaster. Keywords: evacuation, pedestrian, mesoscopic models.