Evacuation time in tall high-rise buildings

Abstract

The increasing number of people in urban areas leads to development of modern cities and creation of taller high-rise buildings. The major concerns of governments, building developers and occupants are evacuation strategies and time required for evacuation of these buildings. In this article, three evacuation scenarios in 60-floor residential building were tested in order to highlight the importance of presenting evacuation time to occupants during an evacuation process, and ensure faster and safer evacuation in the building. In the first experiment, an ordinary case of evacuation has been evaluated, where evacuation time has not been available to the occupants. The second experiment evaluated the impact of presenting evacuation time for elevator arrival on evacuation strategy. In the third experiment, more occupants were re-directed towards elevators based on the quickest way in the building. The evacuation scenarios were simulated by using a continuous model to represent movements of occupants (Pathfinder). This study suggests that presenting the evacuation time of the quickest way to occupants, redirects more occupants towards the elevators, resulting in minimizing the total evacuation time.