The role of evacuation and fire modelling in the development of safer air travel

Computer based mathematical models describing the aircraft evacuation process and aircraft fire have a role to play in the design and development of safer aircraft, in the implementaion of safer and more rigorous certification criteria and in post mortuum accident investigation. As the cost and risk involved in performing large-scale fire/evacuation experiments for the next generation 'Very Large Aircraft' (VLA) are expected to be high, the development and use of these modelling tools may become essential if these aircraft are to prove a viable reality. By describing the present capabililties and limitations of the EXODUS evacuation model and associated fire models, this paper will examine the future development and data requirements of these models.

The centrality of groups and classes

This paper extends the standard network centrality measures of degree, closeness and betweenness to apply to groups and classes as well as individuals. The group centrality measures will enable researchers to answer such questions as ‘how central is the engineering department in the informal influence network of this company?’ or ‘among middle managers in a given organization, which are more central, the men or the women?’ With these measures we can also solve the inverse problem: given the network of ties among organization members, how can we form a team that is maximally central? The measures are illustrated using two classic network data sets. We also formalize a measure of group centrality efficiency, which indicates the extent to which a group's centrality is principally due to a small subset of its members.

The application of fire and evacuation simulation in ship design

Fire and evacuation models with features such as the ability to realistically simulate the spread of heat and smoke and the human response to fire as well as the capability to model human performance in heeled orientations linked to a virtual reality environment that produces realistic visualisation of the modelled scenarios are now available and can be used to aid the engineer in assessing ship design and procedures. This paper describes the maritimeEXODUS ship evacuation and the SMARTFIRE fire simulation model and provides an example application demonstrating the use of the models used in pperforming fire and evacuation analysis for a large passenger ship partially based on the requirements of MSC circular 1033.