Exit selection and pedestrian movement in a room with two exits under fire emergency

Abstract

An extended multi-grid model is proposed to study fire evacuation in a two-exit room. The exit selection based on random utility theory, as well as the pedestrian movement in fire, is investigated. The effects of different occupant types, the utility threshold, heat release rate of fire, burning materials and pre-movement time on evacuation are discussed. The results show that active occupants are beneficial for evacuation because of their guidance to the herding pedestrians, whereas, the existence of conservative is not always good for evacuation; a proper frequency of changing target exit can relieve congestion and optimize evacuation process; evacuation time is not monotonically increasing with the increment of heat release rate due to acceleration when pedestrians feel the incentive of high temperature within limit; the effect of burning material on evacuation is related to its thermal physical properties; the pre-movement time aggravates the difficulty of evacuation due to the bad visibility and high CO concentration in fire situation. The study may be useful to predict exit selection and pedestrian movement process, and then give suggestions to guide pedestrian evacuation under fire emergency.