Evacuation Exercises and Simulations Toward Improving Safety at Public Buildings

Abstract

An evacuation exercise was conducted at a teaching and research institute of Lisbon University, where 64 first year graduate students participated. Videos were recorded during the exercise in order to analyze the students' behavior. At the end of the activity students answered a questionnaire. In addition, computer simulations of the evacuation were carried out to compare the theoretical behavior with the experimental one. The results show that although about 90% of the students have participated in drills, some had an inappropriate behavior during the evacuation, such as stopping or walking too slowly. Simulation results show that these kinds of behavior delayed the evacuation by about 5 s. Furthermore, the comparison between experimental results and simulations has highlighted the necessity of studying and developing models capable of reproducing, to some extent, those behaviors considered to be incorrect during an evacuation. These kinds of models might be used to assess the evacuation time considering also the level of training of the population.