Fire evacuation simulation considering the movement of pedestrian according to fire spread

Abstract

A fire simulator and an evacuation simulator are generally used independently to diagnose the safety of a building in the case of the fire and evacuation. However, it is hard to provide highly accurate safety diagnosis with this method because it does not reflect the movement of pedestrians in the situation of a fire. Therefore, this study proposed a fire evacuation simulation technique that can describe the movement of pedestrians with considering the fire spread. The proposed simulation technique applies the fire spread data of the fire dynamics simulator (FDS) to the floor field model (FFM) and it models that pedestrians recognizes the fire and take a detour to a safe route. This study proposed a method to link the data between FDS and FFM and an improved FFM considering fire spread. Additionally, the proposed method was applied to a real building on a university campus. This study simulated evacuations under various scenarios. Simulation results showed that the number of evacuees escaping through each exit varied by the presence of fire. Moreover, it was found that the evacuation time was increased or decreased by the fire and bottleneck phenomenon was also worsened under fire situation.