Simulating the Evacuation of Students Attending Classes at the York University’s Keele Campus

Since 1901, Canada has recorded over a thousand disasters (CDD, 2015). Ontario, a province possessing the highest number of incidents and evacuations, has adapted and learned from these experiences. The Emergency Movement and Civil Protection Act (1990) for example, legally obliged government organizations to maintain an emergency management program. Despite the measures set out by the government there were still a dominant paradigm of disaster, leading many to believe nothing could be done, when one occurs, or that they would not be affected one. Morris (2009) proved otherwise when it came to school shootings (a technological disaster). Morris illustrated awareness and preparedness in school led to resilient students who were less affected by the disasters. An important observation, as school disasters in particular have the ability to cause jarring impacts to a community. This Major Paper presents a simulation model that evacuates students attending classes at the York University Keele Campus. The agent-based model was constructed with data acquired from York University’s Office of Institutional Planning & Analysis, York University’s Planning & Architectural Design branch of the Campus Services and Business Operation, and scientific journals. The model reproduces the number of registered students during the winter semester of 2014, from Monday to Sunday. This cycle stops, when a signal is given, informing of an evacuation. From this instance, students, proceeded through a series of steps before arriving to one of four predetermined evacuation zones. These steps included: 1) pre-movement 2) descend the corresponding multi-floored building and 3) travel at an assigned speed to the evacuation zone. Forty evacuation scenarios, ten for each evacuation zones, were generated at varying times of day, throughout the week. The gathered times were further analyzed with three variables: the student population, the number of buildings holding classes, and the percentage of buildings within the vicinity of an evacuation zone. The student population demonstrated a logarithmic relationship with time, where evacuation time became more consistent as the population sized increased. When it came to the analysis of the number of buildings holding classes, the greater number of buildings, meant the buildings were more spread out and resulted in similar evacuation time for all four evacuation zones. The last case examined the percentage of buildings within the vicinity of an evacuation zone, half of the evacuation zones possessed a linear relationship, where the greater percentages meant a shorter arrival time.