HCC: Small: Cyber-Enabled Analysis and Control of Building Evacuation

本项目将：（1）建立一个实验装置，用于在三维虚拟在线社区中进行疏散实验。(2)对实验设置的现实性进行分析，并研究改进的方法。（3）研究在紧急情况下，智能标识对人们行为的控制。 建筑物、体育场和城市街区设计的一个主要方面是它们是否适合疏散。人们的生命取决于这些建筑在火灾、地震、恐怖袭击和建筑物倒塌等紧急情况下的疏散速度。然而，由于9/11恐怖袭击，很明显，目前的方法，建筑设计方面的紧急疏散的各种建筑类型，如高层建筑，机场和体育场需要重新审查。特别是，设计必须根据疏散程序进行仔细评估。这引起了人们对缺乏工具的主要关注，这些工具可以对设计环境中的真实人类运动和交互进行强大的预测。很明显，在每一种可能的紧急情况下，建立成千上万人撤离每一种可能的建筑设计的现场实验是不切实际的。该研究不仅将评估虚拟世界信息技术作为建筑设计的工具，以促进疏散，而且还将开发可用于现实世界建筑的新信息技术。 例如，智能出口标志可以在紧急情况下根据已知的建筑信息，紧急情况的类型和位置以及当前人员分布情况自动引导人员。建立一个实验装置进行疏散实验在3D虚拟在线社区需要回答这样的非正统的问题，如如何吸引研究对象的实验，如何激励参与者疏散建筑物时，紧急情况发生时，应该做什么样的设置，以评估疏散效率尽可能真实。分析和改进设置的真实感需要研究自然效果的真实感模拟，如火灾，数百个角色的实时真实人体运动合成，以及开发有效的方法来测量参与者的沉浸感。最后，智能标志的控制策略的设计需要在不确定性算法下的实时决策理论规划的研究，适用于大规模多智能体系统的控制。建筑物的安全对任何社会都至关重要。自然灾害、恐怖袭击和火灾事故每年造成数千人丧生。通过设计更容易疏散的建筑物，工程师可以挽救这些生命中的很大一部分。然而，缺乏工具，使工程师能够在疏散效率方面对建筑设计进行高保真评估。这项研究旨在为工程师提供以比以前更低的成本进行这种大规模高保真实验的机会。这方面的进展也将产生积极的教育影响。 该项目将在本科数字媒体设计课程中发挥重要作用，该课程约有50%的女性学生。

This project will: (1) Build an experimental setup for conducting evacuation experiments inside 3D virtual online communities. (2) Analyze the realism of the experimental setup and research the ways to improve it. (3) Investigate the use of intelligent signs for controlling peoples' behavior in emergency situations. One of the major aspects in the design of buildings, stadiums and city blocks is their suitability for evacuation. Peoples' lives depend on how quickly these constructions can be evacuated in the emergency situations such as fires, earthquakes, terrorist attacks and collapsing structures. As a result of the 9/11 terrorist attacks however, it became apparent that current approaches to building design in regard to emergency evacuation for various building typologies such as high-rises, airports and stadiums need to be re-examined. In particular, the designs must be carefully evaluated against evacuation procedures. This raised a major concern about the lack of tools that would allow robust predictions of realistic human movements and interaction in the designed environments. It is clearly impractical to establish live experiments with thousands of people evacuating every possible building design for every possible emergency condition. The research will not only evaluate virtual-world information technology as a tool for building design to facilitate evacuation, but it will also develop new information technology that could be incorporated in real-world buildings. For example, intelligent exit signs could automatically direct people during emergencies based on the known information about the construction, the type and location of emergency, and the current distribution of people. Building an experimental setup for conducting evacuation experiments within 3D virtual online communities requires answering such unorthodox questions as how to attract research subjects to the experiments, how to motivate the participants to evacuate buildings when emergency occurs, and what setup should be made to evaluate the efficiency of evacuation as truthfully as possible. The analysis and improvement of the realism of the setup requires research in realistic simulation of natural effects such as fire, real-time realistic human motion synthesis for hundreds of characters and developing effective means of measuring the immersiveness of participants. Finally, the design of control strategies for intelligent signs requires the research of real-time decision-theoretic planning under uncertainty algorithms suitable for the control of massive multi-agent systems. The safety of buildings is of critical importance to any society. Natural hazards, terrorist attacks and fire accidents cause losses of thousands of lives every year. By designing buildings that are easier to evacuate, engineers can save a significant fraction of these lives. Yet, there is a lack of tools that would allow engineers to conduct high-fidelity evaluations of building designs in terms of evacuation efficiency. This research is directed towards providing engineers with access to conducting such large-scale high-fidelity experiments at drastically lower expense than previously possible. Progress in this direction will also have positive educational impacts. The project will play a significant part in the classes offered in an undergraduate Digital Media Design program, which has about 50% female students.