Required travel distance and exit width for rooms determined by risk-based evacuation safety design method

Abstract

Introducing fire risk concept in performance-based fire safety design of building is beneficial in many aspects of evacuation safety. In this study, the risk-based evacuation safety design method developed based on fire risk concept was applied to simplify the procedure of performance-based evacuation safety verification of rooms of which the fire risk is relatively low. The critical travel distance to room exit and required exit width derived from this method are found to be dependent on room area but the critical travel distance becomes to be relatively insensitive to room area as the area increase. The particular advantage of this method is that engineers can easily develop the evacuation safety standards for safe room evacuation and designers can check the evacuation safety performance of a large number of rooms in a building efficiently using the developed standards. The comparison of the derived standards for travel distance and exit width with the travel distances and exit widths in actual building rooms revealed that the method in this paper is reasonable and practicable in actual verification practices of evacuation safety of rooms.