Emergency evacuation simulation in staircases considering evacuees' physical and psychological status

Abstract

Building evacuation in case of emergency events such as fire and smoke has long been recognized as a crucial issue. Stair is the main egress, whether the staircases meet the criterion of building safety is thus important. But it is difficult or even impossible to test staircases in actual emergency events. In view of this, simulation is a proper method, and how to improve evacuation simulation in staircases is important. This problem, however, is difficult because several important evacuees' physical factors, which are ignored by many studies, should be considered in simulation model, and evacuees' psychology and moving uncertainties need to be considered, and evacuation experiments are needed to validate the simulation model. In this paper, a new cellular automata model is established. Several crucial physical factors and how evacuee's psychology influences their behaviors are introduced into this model. To simulate evacuees' moving uncertainties, a split-and-recombine grid map and a group of novel transition rules are introduced. To validate this simulation, a fire drill held in a high-rise building was video recorded. It is found that the simulation results are similar to the fire drill results according to statistical method. Several interesting phenomena, which happen in actual emergency evacuation events, are captured in the simulation process such as overtaking, merging, and going along the inner side of a staircase. The structure of this model is simple, and it is easy to be further developed and utilized in different buildings with various kinds of occupants such as children, adult and the old.