A proposal for the goals and new techniques of modelling pedestrian evacuation in fires

Abstract

In this article, we propose the goals for evacuation simulations in the context of the fire safety engineering. It is proposed that the safety of a building design should be measured using F-N plots that are based on the fire statistics. A new evacuation code is developed that allows the modelling of 'panic' situations and interaction between evacuation simulation and the state-of-the-art fire simulation. The major features of the new code are described and first preliminary results are shown. The method presented was found to run satisfactorily, and fast enough for practical purposes. When the results were compared against the results obtained using Simulex and buildingExodus codes, a good agreement was found in two of the three cases but for a case with congested corridor considerable differences occurred. Copyright © 2005 International Association for Fire Safety Science.