Extending the use of evacuation simulators to support counter terrorism: using models of human behaviour to coordinate emergency responses to Improvised Explosive Devices

Software simulations have been widely used to model evacuations from fire but very few have been used to analyse a wider range of hazards, including terrorist attacks. The following pages describe how one group of evacuation simulations has been extended to support the risk assessments that drive counter terrorism. Two key areas are discussed; changes in the human response to the detonation of improvised explosive devices and the modelling of coordinated attack scenarios. These two issues create significant differences between the use of simulators to model ‘conventional’ evacuations and those that can be used to mitigate the effects of terrorist attacks