Abstract
In order to provide a reliable evacuation design assessment, data showing the variation in pre-movement time is of vital importance. The pre-movement time is in many cases regarded as the main time period during an evacuation assessment. Therefore, forty unannounced evacuation experiments for six different occupancies were analysed to quantify pre-movement time during building evacuation, i.e., the time taken between receiving the first cue and initiation of movement towards an exit during evacuation. The occupancies were office, cinema theatres, restaurants, department stores and night clubs. The occupancies were equipped with different types of evacuation alarm systems. The study resulted in 2486 data points for the pre-movement time. The pre-movement times were matched to statistical distributions to describe the variation. It was found that the pre-movement times in most cases could be represented with a lognormal or loglogistic distribution typically having a rapid initial increase representing the phase when people start reacting, which is followed by a less steep decrease representing the phase when some people linger before evacuating. Most reliable data are provided for the cinema theatre experiments which included 1954 data points from 30 experiments. The paper also presents a structure for performing an assessment of video recorded evacuation experiment determining actions, relevant time data and fitting a statistical distribution to the data. The new information provided in the paper can help fire safety professionals to more accurately predict the time to evacuate different premises.
Highlights
The sequence of actions related to human behaviour in fires can traditionally be structured in four stages, known as behaviour sequences [1]
Activities associated with different actions in the behaviour sequence does not necessarily follow a certain pattern and the process may be repeated during an evacuation
The focus in this paper is to present a structured method to analyse video recordings from evacuation experiments and to present the data on the pre-movement phase in terms of statistical distributions, not just as mean value and a standard deviation
Summary
The sequence of actions related to human behaviour in fires can traditionally be structured in four stages, known as behaviour sequences [1]. Fire Technology 2019 tial activity consists of receiving information and the subsequent stage relates to interpreting the received information. At this second stage, people can either ignore or investigate the cues. People evacuate the building, fight the fire, warn others or wait. This may be seen as behaviour activities leading to riskreducing actions of people in emergency situations after becoming aware of the fire threat. Activities associated with different actions in the behaviour sequence does not necessarily follow a certain pattern and the process may be repeated during an evacuation
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