A Study Of Crowd Behavior In Emergency Tunnel Procedures

In the last years unfortunately some tragedies have occurred inside tunnels (i.e. Mont Blanc Road Tunnel in 1999 and others) causing many deaths and serious injuries for several people, so a greater sensibility towards safety, both in terms of infrastructure and devices but also in terms of people awareness, has been grown. The authors propose to study the importance of the human behavior and all the factors involving one’s choices during the evacuation phase inside a long motorway tunnel. In order to take into account all the criteria that affect the choices, especially human factors typical of a PECS model, which involves Physical, Emotional, Cognitive and Social behaviors, a multicriteria analysis has been conducted, using Modeling and Simulation (M&S) reproducing a decision network thanks to Saaty’s AHP (Analytic Hierarchic Process). This model is quite similar to the classical PECS models proposed such as Adam Model, in which Adam, thanks to his attributes and knowledge, tries to survive inside his world exploring it and avoiding all the potential dangerous situations; in fact, the person inside the tunnel, thanks to his/her physical, emotional, cognitive and social attitudes (these ones not present in Adam’s world where he is alone), has to manage how to survive from a fire or a smoke intoxication reaching safety as soon as he can even sacrificing, at least, an expensive good as a car is.