Calculating and Verifying the Staircase-length for Evacuation Analysis

Abstract

Recently, evacuation analysis, which is one of the performance-based evacuation design methods, has been widely used to estimate the egress capacity of buildings and analyze evacuees’ characteristics. But almost all the models do not consider accurate evacuation scenarios because of the limitation of simulations, especially when setting up the staircase-length in building geometry mode. Therefore, this study selected a subject of a high-rise building with 351 invited participants, and conducted an experiment to investigate the evacuation from the 30th floor to the ground level and then classified overall 5,265 movement cases to calculate the participants' evacuation route. After the trial experiment, the paper calculated the precise average distance of participants' evacuation route in staircases considering each zone’s length and dimension and derived the numerical equations for inputting the parameter of staircase-length in evacuation models. And the verifications were also conducted by comparing simulations with the results of the experiment.