A Support System for Developing Tourist Evacuation Guidance

Abstract

This study presents the development of a computer simulator that can evaluate the effectiveness of various evacuation guidance methods for tourists from disaster areas to specific safe destinations. The majority of studies on providing evacuation guidance have targeted residents, with little consideration for visitors to the area such as tourists and businesspeople. Most tourists tend to converge on the limited number of rail stations, which may result in severe crowding and panic. This system, which implements a phased evacuation guidance method, can simulate an evacuation route on the map by entering basic information such as the starting point, emergency evacuation site, eventual evacuation shelter and the number of evacuees. To show the appearance of crowding in a place on the evacuation route, we try to visualize the number of evacuees in the space. The effectiveness of the system was tested by simulation of evacuation processes that utilize a phased evacuation guidance method to be introduced in Kyoto, the most popular tourist destination city in Japan.