A pre-evacuation database for use in egress simulations

Abstract

Quantifying the pre-evacuation time (i.e., the time between first awareness and deliberate evacuation movement), is a key task for evacuation model users and fire safety engineers. The identification and employment of pre-evacuation data given an incident scenario is not a simple task for evacuation model users and fire safety engineers since data is typically scarce, partial and often difficult to access. In this work, we address this issue by presenting an expanded database including pre-evacuation times collected from 9 fire incidents and 103 evacuation drills involving 13,591 evacuees in 16 countries. These case studies are grouped according to the occupancy type of the structure(s) involved. We also used cluster analysis to identify sub-groups and potential factors that influence performance. Using this pre-evacuation data, we calibrate a set of pre-evacuation distributions that can be used to represent pre-evacuation data in existing building evacuation models. This work provides a useful resource for evacuation model users and fire safety engineers and also may provide additional insights to researchers into the factors that influence pre-evacuation times. Finally, this work can have an impact on future data collection and analysis by identifying the need for new data for specific occupancies.