Optimization of Building Exit Layout: Combining Exit Decisions of Evacuees

Guofeng Ma,Shan Jiang,Yuqi Wang,Heap-Yih (John) Chong

doi:10.1155/2021/6622661

Abstract

Exits are essential to the efficiency of building evacuation due to its irreplaceable function, and the layout of multiple exits has always been the key concern for architectural design. To accurately evaluate the evacuation efficiency of different multiexit layouts and optimize the design rules, a dynamic exit decision model integrating an exit selection strategy and the social force model is developed to simulate the practical evacuation. And our proposed model outperforms the original social force model in terms of evacuation efficiency. Accordingly, different layouts are analyzed for evacuation in a single room with two exits. The analysis results reveal that evacuation time will be improved with the changes of exit locations and two parallel exits are validated as the most efficient layout among the three common categories. Affected by walking time and queuing time of evacuees, it is not conducive to evacuation whether the separation of two exits is too large or too small. Furthermore, an even symmetry is found more efficient than an asymmetric distribution of exits under some conditions. This work provides a basis for architectural designs of multiple exits and a foundation for further study of evacuation simulation.

Highlights

Evacuation describes a certain collective behavior where pedestrians are brought together in groups and move like a whole to a safe area once a danger is recognized [1, 2]
The rational decision-making group of exit decision model (EDM), who can change their minds to a better exit, leads to a smaller and lighter crowded area exhibited in Figures 4(c) and 4(d)
E distribution of evacuation times associated with each experimental condition is depicted in Figure 5. e plots visualize the evacuation time for the trials as well as minimum, first quartile, average, third quartile, and maximum of the observed evacuation time for each imitated scenario in simulation over 50 repeats. e blue boxes on the left of the two plots are associated with social force model (SFM) while the green boxes on the right correspond to EDM. e bisector line y x is superimposed to facilitate the comparison, and the scatter of the boxes around the line is a measure of the dissimilarity between the EDM and the SFM outputs

Summary

Introduction

Evacuation describes a certain collective behavior where pedestrians are brought together in groups and move like a whole to a safe area once a danger is recognized [1, 2]. Uncontrolled collective behaviors and inefficient architectural designs have been identified as two key factors that contribute to tragedies [10]. Erefore, it is necessary to understand the behaviors of people in evacuation processes and improve evacuation efficiency by optimizing architectural designs [11]. People have been adopting performance-based solutions to address complex design issues [12, 13], and crowd evacuation simulation is viewed as an effective method to help engineers identify design shortcomings and improve building performance. Crowd modeling has emerged from a need for pedestrian simulation that adapts to technological development and challenges of laboratory experiments, and many simulations have been conducted to reproduce crowd behaviors at egress [14]

Methods

Results

Conclusion