Geo-information technology can be of considerable use in disaster management, but with considerable challenge in integrating systems, interoperability and reliability. This book provides a broad overview of geo-information technology, software, systems needed, currently used and to be developed for disaster management. The text invites discussion on systems and requirements for use of geo-information under time and stress constraints and unfamiliar situations, environments and circumstances.

This SpringerBrief focuses on the use of egress models to assess the optimal strategy for total evacuation in high-rise buildings. It investigates occupant relocation and evacuation strategies involving the exit stairs, elevators, sky bridges and combinations thereof. Chapters review existing information on this topic and describe case study simulations of a multi-component exit strategy. This review provides the architectural design, regulatory and research communities with a thorough understanding of the current and emerging evacuation procedures and possible future options. A model case study simulates seven possible strategies for the total evacuation of two identical twin towers linked with two sky-bridges at different heights. The authors present the layout of the building and the available egress components including both vertical and horizontal egress components, namely stairs, occupant evacuation elevators (OEEs), service elevators, transfer floors and sky-bridges. The evacuation strategies employ a continuous spatial representation evacuation model (Pathfinder) and are cross-validated by a fine network model (STEPS). Assessment of Total Evacuation Systems for Tall Buildings is intended for practitioners as a tool for analyzing evacuation methods and efficient exit strategies. Researchers working in architecture and fire safety will also find the book valuable.

I was invited to join the Organizing Committee of the First International Conference on Complex Sciences: Theory and Applications (Complex 2009) as its ninth member. At that moment, eight distinguished colleagues, General Co-chairs Eugene Stanley and Gaoxi Xiao, Technical Co-chairs J·nos Kertész and Bing-Hong Wang, Local Co-chairs Hengshan Wang and Hong-An Che, Publicity Team Shi Xiao and Yubo Wang, had spent hundreds of hours pushing the conference half way to its birth. Ever since then, I have been amazed to see hundreds of papers flooding in, reviewed and commented on by the TPC members. Finally, more than 200 contributions were - lected for the proceedings currently in your hands. They include about 200 papers from the main conference (selected from more than 320 submissions) and about 33 papers from the five collated workshops: Complexity Theory of Art and Music (COART) Causality in Complex Systems (ComplexCCS) Complex Engineering Networks (ComplexEN) Modeling and Analysis of Human Dynamics (MANDYN) Social Physics and its Applications (SPA) Complex sciences are expanding their colonies at such a dazzling speed that it - comes literally impossible for any conference to cover all the frontiers.

The book entitled “Advancements in Smart City and Intelligent Building” is the Proceedings of the International Conference on Smart City and Intelligent Building (ICSCIB 2018) held in Hefei, China, September 15-16, 2018. It contains 58 papers in total categorized into 8 different tracks, on Building Energy Efficiency, Construction Robot and Automation, Intelligent Community and Urban Safety, Intelligentialization of Heating Ventilation Air Conditioning System, Information Technology and Intelligent Transportation Systems, New Generation Intelligent Building Platform Techniques, Smart Home and Utility, and Smart Underground Space, which cover a wide range areas of smart cities and intelligent buildings. ICSCIB2018 provided an international forum for professionals, academics, and researchers to present the latest developments from interdisciplinary theoretical studies, computational algorithm developments and engineering applications in smart cities and smart buildings. This academic event featured many opportunities to network with colleagues from around the world in a wonderful environment. Its program covered invitation and presentations from scientists, researchers, and practitioners who have been working in the related areas to establish platforms for collaborative research projects in these fields. The conference invited leaders from industry and academia to exchange and share their experiences, present research results, explore collaborations and to spark new ideas, with the aim of developing new projects and exploiting new technology in these fields, and bridge theoretical studies and emerging applications in various science and engineering branches. This book addresses the recent development and achievement in the field of smart city and intelligent building. It is primarily intended for researchers and students for undergraduate and postgraduate programs in the background of multiple disciplines including computer science, information systems, information technology, automatic control and automation, electrical and electronic engineering, and telecommunications who wish to develop and share their ideas, knowledge and new findings in smart city and intelligent building.

An aging population, increasing obesity and more people with mobility impairments are bringing new challenges to the management of routine and emergency people movement in many countries. These population challenges, coupled with the innovative designs being suggested for both the built environment and other commonly used structures (e.g., transportation systems) and the increasingly complex incident scenarios of fire, terrorism, and large-scale community disasters, provide even greater challenges to population management and safety. Pedestrian and Evacuation Dynamics, an edited volume, is based on the Pedestrian and Evacuation Dynamics (PED) 5th International 2010 conference, March 8th-10th 2010, located at the National Institute of Standards and Technology, Gaithersburg, MD, USA. This volume addresses both pedestrian and evacuation dynamics and associated human behavior to provide answers for policy makers, designers, and emergency management to help solve real world problems in this rapidly developing field. Data collection, analysis, and model development of people movement and behavior during nonemergency and emergency situations will be covered as well.

This single resource for the fire safety community distills the most relevant and useful science and research into a consensus-based guide whose key factors and considerations impact the response and behavior of occupants of a building during a fire event. The Second Edition of SFPE's Engineering Guide: Human Behavior in Fire provides a common introduction to this field for the broad fire safety community: fire protection engineers/fire safety engineers, human behavior scientists/researchers, design professionals, and code authorities. The public benefits from consistent understanding of the factors that influence the responses and behaviors of people when threatened by fire and the application of reliable methodologies to evaluate and estimate human response in buildings and structures. This Guide also aims to lessen the uncertainties in the "people components" of fire safety and allow for more refined analysis with less reliance on arbitrary safety factors. As with fire science in general, our knowledge of human behavior in fire is growing, but is still characterized by uncertainties that are traceable to both limitation in the science and unfamiliarity by the user communities. The concepts for development of evacuation scenarios for performance-based designs and the technical methods to estimate evacuation response are reviewed with consideration to the limitation and uncertainty of the methods. This Guide identifies both quantitative and qualitative information that constitutes important consideration prior to developing safety factors, exercising engineering judgment, and using evacuation models in the practical design of buildings and evacuation procedures. Besides updating material in the First Edition, this revision includes new information on: Incapacitating Effects of Fire Effluent & Toxicity Analysis Methods Occupant Behavior Scnearios Movement Models and Behavioral Models Egress Model Selection, Verification, and Validation Estimation of Uncertainty and Use of Safety Factors Enhancing Human Response to Emergencies & Notification of Messaging The prediction of human behavior during a fire emergency is one of the most challenging areas of fire protection engineering. Yet, understanding and considering human factors is essential to designing effective evacuation systems, ensuring safety during a fire and related emergency events, and accurately reconstructing a fire.

The international conference on "Pedestrian and Evacuation Dynamics", held on February 27-29, 2008 at Wuppertal University in Germany, was the fourth in this series after successful meetings in Duisburg (2001), Greenwich (2003) and Vienna (2005). The conference was aimed at improving the scientific exchange between scientists, experts and practitioners of various fields of pedestrian and evacuation dynamics and featured: the analysis of evacuation processes and pedestrian motion, modeling of pedestrian dynamics in various situations, experiments on pedestrian dynamics, human behavior research, regulatory action. All these topics are included in this book to give a broad and state-of-the-art overview of pedestrian and evacuation dynamics.