Improving emergency evacuation through evidence-based evacuation drills - Natalie van der Wal

This paper provides findings of a recent trans-national research project on evacuation drills: this establishes the main limitations of existing drills, makes recommendations for future drills and proposes a programme of work for their implementation.

Gwynne, S., Amos, M., Kinateder, M., Benichou, N., Boyce, K., van der Wal, C.N., Ronchi, E. (2020). The future of evacuation drills: Assessing and enhancing evacuee performance. Safety Science. In press.

ABSTRACT
Evacuation drills are generally the main mechanism for improving or measuring occupant performance in emergency situations, but their effectiveness is
often hard to measure, and there is limited evidence for sustained training benefits. However, innovations in technology (e.g., augmented/virtual reality, novel
sensors and wearable tech) offer (when combined with new approaches to designing and delivering drills) significant opportunities for a \next generation" of
evidence-based evacuation drills. In this paper, we present the findings of a recent trans-national research project; we establish the main limitations of existing
drills, propose a framework for the assessment of both training and evaluation aspects of drills, make a number of recommendations, and suggest a programme
of work for their implementation. The paper, therefore, provides a conceptual foundation for future work which will focus on (1) establishing an evidence-based
methodology for assessing evacuation drills (and alternatives), (2) harnessing novel objective and automatable approaches to data capture/analytics in order
to better characterize performance, (3), developing alternatives to the current drill model, based on emerging technologies, and (4) developing guidance for
regulatory bodies on the costs and benefits of each approach for different scenarios.