Built Environment Safer in Slow and Emergency Conditions
through behavioUral assessed/designed Resilient solutions

The Università Politecnica delle Marche (UNIVPM), founded in 1969, is a public teaching and research university, characterized by a technical-scientific vocation. UNIVPM is one of the leading mid-sized universities in Italy, ranking in the top 5. UNIVPM participated in over 50 highly competitive European research projects (FP7, H2020, LIFE) and through the support of its own international research divisions and the dedicated personnel officers, UNIVPM takes part in several programs promoting and sustaining research, international collaboration and mobility. 

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The research team which works at BE S2ECURe is specialized on built environment and users' safety in emergency conditions and is composed by Professors, Researchers, Research Fellows and PhD students of the Construction, Civil Engineering and Architecture Department (DICEA), which is among the best University Departments of Italy, awarded a grant of €6.6M to strengthen its leading position in its fields.

The team works on all the aspects of disaster management and planning field related to built environments and users’ typologies (gender, age, disabled persons,…). Particular attention is paid at human behaviour in emergencies (i.e. qualitative and quantitative analysis of evacuation and emergency behaviours through real world and VR experiments), engineering sciences (including architecture and man-environment influences), information engineering tools (i.e. simulation of evacuation behaviours through advanced models). Researches deal with both indoor (i.e. fire, earthquake) and outdoor (i.e. flood, earthquake, terrorist acts) emergencies in the built environment, to provide tools and guidelines for analysing, designing and managing the built environment, the emergency facilities and the First Responders’ actions towards a direct support of the hosted population in emergency conditions. The team has been also added to the NO-FEAR network (Network Of practitioners For Emergency medicAl systems and cRitical care) under the EC Grant Agreement No 786670 (from July 2019).

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The team owns its BS&T Lab (Building Science & Technology) equipped with sophisticated instrumentation for the analysis of human behaviours and for related simulation issues. A specific section is dedicated to VR experiments with 2 VR headset including eyes-tracking motion systems to detect the attention of individuals among specific visual drivers. The team also owns one proprietary (agent-based) software (PES) to simulate pedestrian evacuation, as well as, commercial software for qualitative and quantitative analysis on videotapes to detect behaviour in experiments and real-world event. Computer cluster and computer networks (with high-end CPUs and GPUs) can run simulation and video analysis software, as well as deploy server for VR experiments and human tracking equipment.