Emergency evacuation of people with disabilities: A survey of drills, simulations, and accessibility

Abstract

A natural or man-made disaster may destabilize the structure of a building and endanger the lives of its occupants. Evacuating occupants in the shortest possible time is the first reaction in such situations, often referred to as indoor emergency evacuation. Indoor emergency evacuations pay little attention to people with disabilities (PWD) who face additional challenges in emergency situations than people without disabilities. This work highlights the major findings in literature with regard to emergency evacuation of PWD and underscores the related shortcomings and gaps for future research. Current studies can be categorized in: evacuation drills, computer evacuation models, and indoor accessibility measures for PWD. Evacuation drills are focused on assessing the ability of PWD to negotiate different surface types and bottlenecks, but none on understanding their behavior and decisions during an emergency evacuation. Computer simulations are focused on developing evacuation plans by minimizing the overall evacuation time, but fail to capture the dynamics, uncertainties, and complexities in a real-world evacuation scenario. Only few studies are devoted to measuring the accessibility of indoor environments to PWD, most of which are not suitable for wayfinding purposes. Finally, we discuss research gaps in developing indoor spatial models, accessible, personalized, and collaborative wayfinding, and real-time dynamic evacuation systems with accessible user-interfaces.

Keywords

• emergency evacuation
• indoor wayfinding
• people with disabilities
• evacuation drill
• computer simulation
• accessibility