Advanced Research Workshop - Evacuation and Human Behaviour in Emergency Situations – Santander, Spain – 21 st October 2011 Evacuation models of the future: insights from an online survey of user's experiences and needs Ronchi, E. 1 ; Kinsey M.J. 2 1 Department of Roads and Transportation. Polytechnic University of Bari, Via Orabona 4, 70100 Bari (BA), Italy, enronc@poliba.it 2 Fire Safety Engineering Group (FSEG), University of Greenwich, London SE10 9LS, UK, m.j.kinsey@greenwich.ac.uk ABSTRACT This paper presents a summary analysis of data regarding evacuation model user‟s experiences and needs obtained via an online survey. The survey was available in 6 languages: English, German, Chinese, Spanish, Italian and Russian. The different versions allowed the survey to be accessible to an international participant base. The survey was developed by the team at www.Evacmod.net ; an evacuation modelling portal for the simulation of human behaviour during emergency situations. Participant responses to the survey in raw data format will be publicly available from the portal to allow model developers/users or any interested parties to analyse the data. In total 198 participants either fully or partially completed the survey. Participants came from some 36 different countries, from a wide range of different education and occupational backgrounds, and used models for a variety of different purposes. The survey consisted of 16 questions addressing issues including perception of importance of model features, usage/awareness of other models, knowledge of model validation/verification, training, and usage of multiple models. The presented analysis provides information for evacuation model developers of user characteristics and subsequent guidance for instructing future model development. 1 INTRODUCTION The understanding of human behaviour in fire has received more research interest during latter half of the 20 th century. In parallel, the development of fire safety building codes [1] has required engineers to demonstrate buildings conform to an increasing number of fire safety requirements. As part of this, analytical people flow calculations were traditionally adequate to demonstrate a structures evacuation capability. However, the development of ever unique and complex structures has meant it is not always possible to assess certain structures using such calculations [2]. This has fuelled the development and usage of computer based evacuation models to explore the potential influence of human factors during unique/complex emergency situations [3,4]. The use of computers to simulate emergency evacuations can be traced back to the 1970s [5]. Since then a number of evacuation models have been developed with a range of different features [6,7]. Indeed evacuation model capabilities [8,9], scrutiny [10,11] and validation [12,13] have been the focus of a large a number of research papers in the last two decades.