To See Behind the Curtain – A Methodical Approach to Identify Calculation Methods of Closed-Source Evacuation Software Tools

Abstract

Commercial software-tools for evacuation calculation are mostly closed-source (also called “proprietary”) software-tools. Contrary to open-source software tools users of closed-source software-tools have to trust the technical manual of the software to understand how the software works. For users it is im- portant to know how the model they use works, because without this knowledge results calculated by the software-tool can be interpreted in a wrong way. We will present a methodology how to identify basics of evacuation modelling and how to interpret and understand calculated results in a better way. This methodology should give users a “better feeling” in a very short time for the model they use for evacuation analysis and calculation.