Dynamic Decision-Making Process of Evacuees during Post-Earthquake Evacuation near an Automatic Flap Barrier Gate System: A Broken Windows Perspective

Yu Song, Jia Liu and Qian Liu
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Yu Song: School of Public Administration, Huazhong Agricultural University, Wuhan 430072, China
Jia Liu: School of Information and Safety Engineering, Zhongnan University of Economics and Law, Wuhan 430073, China
Qian Liu: School of Public Administration, Huazhong Agricultural University, Wuhan 430072, China

Sustainability, 2021, vol. 13, issue 16, 1-19

Abstract: The automatic flap barrier gate system (AFBGS) plays a critical role in building security, but it is more vulnerable to natural hazards than common exits (including power failure, due to earthquakes, and delayed evacuation, due to safety certification, etc.). This article considers a dynamic decision-making process of evacuees during post-earthquake evacuation near an AFBGS. An interesting metaphor, broken windows (BW), is utilized to interpret people’s actual behavior during evacuation. A multi-stage decision-making mechanism of evacuees is developed to characterize the instantaneous transition among three defined stages: Habitual, mild, and radical states. Then, we build a modified three-layer social force model to reproduce the interaction between evacuees based on an actual post-earthquake evacuation. The simulations reveal that BW provides a contextualized understanding of emergency evacuation with a similar effect to the traditional metaphor. An earlier appearance of a mild rule breaker leads to a higher crowd evacuation efficiency. If evacuees maintain the state of broken windows behavior (BWB), the crowd evacuation efficiency can be improved significantly. Contrary to the criminological interpretation, the overall effect of mild BWB is positive, but the radical BWB is encouraged under the command of guiders.

Keywords: post-earthquake evacuation; decision-making process; automatic flap barrier gate system; broken windows; social force (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: O13 Q Q0 Q2 Q3 Q5 Q56 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2021
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

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