Grandison, A. ORCID: 0000-0002-9714-1605, Cavanagh, Y., Lawrence, P. J. ORCID: 0000-0002-0269-0231 and Galea, E. R. ORCID: 0000-0002-0001-6665 (2017) Increasing the simulation performance of large-scale evacuations using parallel computing techniques based on domain decomposition. Fire Technology, 53 (3). pp. 1399-1438. ISSN 0015-2684 (Print), 1572-8099 (Online) (doi:https://doi.org/10.1007/s10694-016-0645-8)

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Abstract

Evacuation simulation has the potential to be used as part of a decision support system during large-scale incidents to provide advice to incident commanders. To be viable in these applications, it is essential that the simulation can run many times faster than real time. Parallel processing is a method of reducing run times for very large computational simulations by distributing the workload amongst a number of processors. This paper presents the development of a parallel version of the rule based evacuation simulation software buildingEXODUS using domain decomposition. Four Case Studies (CS) were tested using a cluster, consisting of 10 Intel Core 2 Duo (dual core) 3.16 GHz CPUs. CS-1 involved an idealised large geometry, with 20 exits, intended to illustrate the peak computational speed up performance of the parallel implementation, the population consisted of 100,000 agents; the peak computational speedup (PCS) was 14.6 and the peak real-time speedup (PRTS) was 4.0. CS-2 was a long area with a single exit area with a population of 100,000 agents; the PCS was 13.2 and the PRTS was 17.2. CS-3 was a 50 storey high rise building with a population of 8000/16,000 agents; the PCS was 2.48/4.49 and the PRTS was 17.9/12.9. CS-4 is a large realistic urban area with 60,000/120,000 agents; the PCS was 5.3/6.89 and the PRTS was 5.31/3.0. This type of computational performance opens evacuation simulation to a range of new innovative application areas such as real-time incident support, dynamic signage in smart buildings and virtual training environments.

Item Type:	Article
Additional Information:	© The Author(s) 2017. This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made.
Uncontrolled Keywords:	Parallel computing; Evacuation; Evacuation simulation; Real-time; Large-scale
Faculty / School / Research Centre / Research Group:	Faculty of Engineering & Science > Centre for Numerical Modelling & Process Analysis (CNMPA) > Fire Safety Engineering Group (FSEG) Faculty of Engineering & Science > School of Computing & Mathematical Sciences (CMS) Faculty of Engineering & Science
Last Modified:	04 Mar 2022 13:07
URI:	http://gala.gre.ac.uk/id/eprint/16299

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