Evacuation Time Estimation Model in Large Buildings Based on Individual Characteristics and Real-Time Congestion Situation of Evacuation Exit

Abstract

Fire is one of the most common and harmful disasters in real life. In 2021, firefighting teams in China reported 748,000 fires, resulting in 1987 deaths, 2225 injuries and CNY 6.75 billion of direct property losses, which account for 0.05‰ of GDP. Scientific and accurate estimation of evacuation time can provide decision support for intelligent fire evacuation. This paper aims to effectively improve the evacuation efficiency of people in large buildings, especially for a scenario with intricate evacuation passages. There are many factors that make a difference in evacuation time, such as individual behavior, occupant density, exit width, and so on. The people distribution density is introduced to effectively assess the impact of unstable pedestrian flow and unbalanced distribution in the process of evacuation. The verification results show that there is a strong positive correlation between people distribution density and evacuation time. Combining the people distribution density with many other factors, the training dataset is built by Pathfinder to learn the relationship between evacuation time and influencing factors. Finally, an evacuation time prediction model is established to estimate the consumption time that occupants spend on moving in the evacuation process based on stacking integration. The model can assist occupants in choosing different channels for evacuation in advance. After testing, the average error between the predicted evacuation consumption time and the reference time is 3.63 s. The result illustrates that the model can accurately predict the time consumed in the process of evacuation.