Building Egress Research Articles

Methodology to incorporate seismic damage and debris to evaluate strategies to reduce life safety risk for multi-hazard earthquake and tsunami

This paper presents a methodology to evaluate life safety risk of coastal communities vulnerable to seismic and tsunami hazards. The work explicitly incorporates two important aspects in tsunami evacuation modeling: (1) the effect of earthquake-induced damage to buildings on building egress time, (2) the effect of earthquake-induced debris on horizontal evacuation time. The city of Seaside, Oregon, is selected as a testbed community. The hazard is based on a megathrust earthquake and tsunami from the Cascadia Subduction Zone that was defined in a previous study. The built environment consists of buildings and the transportation network for the city. Fragility analysis is used to estimate the seismic damage to buildings and resulting debris that covers portions of the road network. The horizontal evacuation time is determined based on the shortest path to shelters, including the increased travel time due to the earthquake-generated debris. The effects of different mitigation strategies are quantified. Results indicate the fatality and life safety risk of a near-field tsunami increases by 4.2–8.3 times when the effects of building egress and earthquake-induced debris are considered. The choice of population layer affects the life safety risk and thus the maximum risk is obtained when daytime populations are considered. Use of mitigation strategies result in a significant decrease in the number of fatalities. For hazards with recurrence intervals larger than 500- to 1000-years, the seismic retrofit is comparable to vertical evacuation and an effective strategy in reducing fatalities and associated risks. Implementing all mitigation strategies reduces the life safety risk by 90%.

Fire Egress System Optimization of High-Rise Teaching Building Based on Simulation and Machine Learning

A fire egress system is one of the most critical aspects of fire emergency evacuation, which is the cornerstone technology of building fire safety. The high-rise teaching buildings on campus, where vast crowds of people gather, need to be qualified for rapid evacuation in the event of a fire especially. Conventional teaching building egress system design places more emphasis on individual elements (e.g., stairwells, evacuation doors, and evacuation walkways) rather than on their co-regulation as a whole. Furthermore, there are not enough holistic and effective optimal design strategies, which is because most of the existing studies rely on experiments or simulations and often suffer from a lack of sufficient data to fully reveal the interactions of individual variables. In this study, the co-effectiveness of stairwells, walkways, and room doors in reducing total evacuation time was investigated by simulation and machine learning. We selected a typical high-rise teaching building as an example and integrated two simulation software, Pyrosim and Pathfinder, to compare the available safe evacuation time (ASET) and required safe evacuation time (RSET). Then, a framework consisting of five factors—stair flight width (SFW), stairwell door width (SDW), corridor width (CW), room door width (RDW), and location of the downward stair flight (LDSF)—was established for the optimization through statistical analysis of big data obtained by the preferred machine learning algorithm. Results indicate that (1) By modifying just one factor (SFW), the total evacuation time (TET) can be reduced by at most 12.1%, with the mortality rate dropping from 26.5% to 9.5%; (2) although ASET could not be achieved either, among 4000 cases of multi-factor combinations, a maximum TET improvement degree, 29.5%, can be achieved for the evacuation optimization compared to baseline model, with a consequent reduction in mortality to 0.15%; (3) it shows that the emphasis of the egress system optimization is on the geometric features of the evacuation stairwell; furthermore, the multi-factor combination approaches have better compromised evacuation performances than the single-factor controlled schemes. The research results can be applied as rational design strategies to mitigate fire evacuation issues in high-rise teaching buildings and, in addition, the methodology suggested in this paper would be suitable to other building types.

Evaluating building egress safety for the elderly under different urgent-level circumstances in high-density cities: Based on ABEM-enabled simulation

In high-density cities, people usually live in mid-rise or high-rise residential buildings where indoor environments are quite complicated. Safety risks exist not only within homes, but also on the way to egress from residential buildings. As the aging issue becomes severer, it is essential to provide safe egress plans particularly for the elderly who are more fragile to risks and obstacles. Kinds of emergencies might occur in reality, some are hard to predict and extremely dangerous, while some can be warned in advance and would not cause damages immediately. However, previous research seldom considered the different urgent levels of circumstances during the egress process of the elderly. Consequently, this study contributes to proposing an agent-based egress model (ABEM)-based evaluation of building egress safety for the elderly under different urgent-level circumstances by introducing absolute and relative indicators. Absolute indicators evaluate building egress safety for the elderly, relative indicators reveal whether buildings hinder safe egress of the elderly compared with ordinary residents, and indicator weights are decided by AHP method to compute building egress safety index (BESI) as the evaluation results. Case study shows BESI scores of 8.696, 8.941 and 6.290 under three circumstances. BESI scores are valuable references for old home buyers to make decisions. Furthermore, this evaluation approach offers an effective tool to help designers to improve design schemes for safer egress, to assist property managers in updating egress plans and facilities based on new occupancy status in the operation stage, eventually to facilitate the development of healthy residential buildings.

Evaluating Building Egress Safety for Aged Residents Under Different Urgent-Level Circumstances in High-Density Cities: Based on Abem-Enabled Simulation

Evaluating Building Egress Safety for Aged Residents Under Different Urgent-Level Circumstances in High-Density Cities: Based on Abem-Enabled Simulation

Cruise ships like buildings: Wayfinding solutions to improve emergency evacuation

This research aims at demonstrating that wayfinding solutions can improve the effectiveness of the evacuation processes in complex architectural spaces such as those of cruise ships. We investigated the behaviours of passengers in maritime disaster to figure out whether people act similarly during buildings egress and ships evacuation. Data were collected through questionnaires administered in 2015 to passengers boarding various cruise ships at the port of Ancona (Italy), and through the analysis of real footage of the evacuation of the Costa Concordia. The open source software Fire Dynamics Simulator with Evacuation (FDS+EVAC), used in building egress analyses, was adapted to include these behavioural and event information such as familiarity with ship layout, ship rotation and lifeboats boarding. Simulation results on the case study confirmed similarities between ships and buildings evacuations, underlining the effectiveness of wayfinding solutions to improve passengers’ evacuation flows and routes selection. This study also demonstrated that computer simulation could benefit the ship design process, the preparation of safety guidelines, and the crewmembers during naval emergency management training.

A Cloud-Enabled Building and Fire Emergency Evacuation Application

Mobile devices and applications designed to assist people during emergencies are becoming more common, but their utility depends heavily on the availability of network and appropriate services. This article presents the rescue worker interface (RWI), a cloud-based service to support fire wardens in the event of a building fire emergency and to assist them in carrying out evacuation tasks in a timely, efficient, reliable, and collaborative manner. Fire wardens equipped with handheld devices can monitor and control building systems in real time via the cloud. Specifically, they can view building evacuation status, fire evolution, building occupancy, and the location of other fire wardens. These capabilities provide them greater control and situational awareness to face the emergency and manage the building egress with reduced risks.

Using Case Study Data to Validate 3D Agent-based Pedestrian Simulation Tool for Building Egress Modeling

MassMotion is an agent-based pedestrian simulation tool which employs 3D environments and behavioral profiles to analyze pedestrian movements and route choice. This paper describes how observed evacuation drills were used to validate MassMotion for tower building egress modeling. Validation metrics include modeled evacuation time, journey times, speeds, flow rates, and behavioral observations. The results indicate that MassMotion is a suitable application for tower building egress modeling, producing total evacuation times between 1% and 10% of observed times.

A Network Flow Model for Determining the Safe Evacuation Plan of a Public Building

Emergent evacuation in buildings becomes necessary in case of an accident such as fire, earthquake, toxic gas release etc. Bomb threat also makes it prudent for the occupants to escape out in a minimum possible time. Emergent evacuation is possible when minimum but adequate numbers of escape routes are available to the occupants for efficient movement and rapid evacuation. Inadequate size of routes creates bottlenecks and backtracking that may cause stampede, crushing and trampling. Therefore, it is imperative to examine the building design with respect to numbers & size of exits, stairwells and other substantial features of the building egress plan. Planning of the movement of people is of great importance to the safety measures. Therefore, the systematic scheduling for exit of occupant inside the building is the fundamental requirement for efficient evacuation to minimize the loss of life and avoiding the congestion, backtracking and circling. In this direction, many mathematical models have been developed to compute the evacuation time. In CBRI, attempts have been made to compute the possible time of evacuation with adequate number of escape routes of adequate size to avoid stampede, crushing and trampling. In this paper the attention has been drawn on the rapid evacuation of a building without bottlenecks in the escape routes. The model discussed here based on graph theoretical approach considering the parameters like Dynamic Capacity (DC) and Traversal Time Step (TTS) of each evacuation path. The waiting time for each path has also been minimized using queuing theory. For optimal utilization of paths, the service rate, throughput and response time of each path has also been considered.

A comprehensive method for environmentally sensitive and behavioral microscopic egress analysis in case of fire in buildings

This paper presents a new comprehensive method for microscopic building egress analysis, which considers the behavioral response of occupants to the various environmental conditions in case of fire in a building. This method distinguishes between different types of building users in order to calculate the appropriate egress route for each of them. The egress analysis described in this paper is integrated in the Building Information Modeling (BIM) environment and includes a special wayfinding algorithm. This algorithm has direct access to the digital building model and uses the results of appropriate model-based numerical fire simulations for each egress scenario. With this method, the algorithm behind the egress analysis can access the building properties as well as the environmental parameters in order to realize a reliable egress analysis.

Characterization of movement on vertical circulations

A few years ago, it began in Portugal the development of buildings fire risk analysis model, named MARIE, composed by eleven partial models according to the factors taking influence on that risk, having the model for the building egress (MEE), constituted by the building description model (MDE) and the occupants’ movement model (MMO), already been completed. During MMO development, and due to the absence of national data allowing the characterization and quantification of people’s movement kinematic aspects on adverse environments boosting building evacuation, as stated on fire emergency situations, it was adopted Predtechenskii & Milinskii (P & M) mathematical relations. MEE is, nowadays, being improved, regarding both MDE and MMO. These improvements affecting MMO are related, in one hand, with the occupants’ behaviour, and, in the other hand, with the possibility of application to staircases of the mathematical relations of velocity and flow with density deduced by Predtechenskii & Milinskii. Therefore, several evacuation drills performed at the University of Coimbra Campus were filmed and analysed, where 321 people were involved, in order to obtain the expressions describing the movement in stairs, and later comparing them with P & M’s expressions.

Overall and local movement speeds during fire drill evacuations in buildings up to 31 stories

The time that it takes an occupant population to reach safety when descending a stairwell during building evacuations is typically described by measurable engineering variables such as stairwell geometry, speed, density, and pre-evacuation delay. In turn, engineering models of building evacuation use these variables to predict the performance of egress systems for building design, emergency planning, or event reconstruction. As part of a program to better understand occupant movement and behavior during building emergencies, the Engineering Laboratory at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) has been collecting stairwell movement data during fire drill evacuations of office buildings. These data collections are intended to provide a better understanding of this principal building egress feature and develop a technical foundation for future codes and standards requirements. To date, NIST has collected fire drill evacuation data in eight office building occupancies ranging from 6 to 62 stories in height that have included a range of stairwell widths and occupant densities.While average movement speeds in the current study of 0.48m/s±0.16m/s are observed to be quite similar to the range of literature values, local movement speeds as occupants traverse down the stairwell are seen to vary widely within a given stairwell, ranging from 0.056m/s to 1.7m/s. These data should provide confirmation of the adequacy of existing literature values typically used for occupant movement speeds or provide updated values for future analyses.

Agent-Based Evacuation Simulation for Building Structure Evaluation

Building design has a large impact on emergency evacuation. To identify the best location of doors in a room for fast evacuation, building egress times were computed using agent-based simulation. Human behavior in a building was based on a social force model. The evacuation route was based on the shortest path in a 3D geometric network in a GIS environment. Our results indicated that building egress time is minimized when doorways are located to make the egress path shortest. The integration of an agent-based model and 3D geometric network can be applied further to evaluate more complex structures such as multi-story buildings and subway stations.

Axiomatic considerations of a rule based mechanism for the determination of a building’s egress capability

When a building is designed it possesses a spatial layout of routes and passageways all of which contribute to the building's egress capability--a key consideration in the context of health and safety for occupants. In this paper we examine how such a spatial layout can be interpreted as a vital system of egress, which if processed exhaustively by a naive agent will identify with a measure of egress complexity. We further examine how the established rule-based mechanism for the determination of egress complexity satisfies the generically accepted axioms of complexity and we illustrate some of the algorithms of egress complexity with examples.

Modification of Evacuation Time Computational Model for Stadium Crowd Risk Analysis

The complexity of the evacuation process is associated with the flow of occupants through various egresses available inside the building. Several methods and algorithms are now available to analyse the problem related to evacuation. In the present paper an algorithm, evacuation discrete time model (EDTM) has been presented to analyse the building egress evacuation time problem with previous works. The algorithm is based on the crowd flow theory and uses discrete computational approach to identify various widths of egresses available for movement of the people, which is more accurate and practicable because the crowd flow rate is variable. The developed model has been compared with an existing model to show the capabilities of the developed algorithm. A case of stadium stand egress is chose for the validity of EDTM, and a comparison of EDTM, previous model and computer simulation indicates that both the EDTM and the simulation curves were found to give better predictions than the previous model. Based upon the comparison analysis with stranded crowd and evacuation crowd at a certain time, EDTM shows great value in explaining the cause of stampede-trampling and crushing incident of egress or narrow passage zone.

Building Egress Analysis

This study tries to develop an analysis procedure by which the architecture plans for egress systems can be evaluated and compared at normal condition evacuation or emergency evacuation with static (fixed blockage of selected target spaces, e.g., earthquake, bomb) or dynamic (timed block of target spaces, e.g., fire) blocking. This approach can also be used to compare the evacuation performance of buildings, which includes ones that meet the codes and ones that do not.

Historic Industrial Fires And Their Influence On Contemporary Fire Protection

Brief accounts of five large industrial fires are presented to show how they stimulated advances in fire protection. The five fires reviewed are the 1911 New York City garment factory fire, the 1953 Livonia, Michigan automobile transmission factory fire, the 1977 Cologne, Germany automobile parts warehouse fire, the 1986 Basel, Switzerland chemical warehouse fire, and the 1987 Hinsdale, Illinois telephone exchange fire. Investigations and repercussions of these fires helped lead eventually to several key fire protection developments including: extensive revisions in and awareness of building egress and fire resistance requirements and capabilities, scientifically based laboratory flammability testing, significantly enhanced warehouse sprinkler protection, less hazardous flammable liquid containers, and improvements in the prevention and control of electrical cable fires.

Environmental Design Strategies for Building Egress

The events of September 2001, 2001, plus the events' technical and political aftermath have helped to identify an unfortunate lack of research into building evacuation. The relative dearth of research is ironic given evacuation's central role in mitigation for a range of emergencies and its prominence in environmental design requirements in building codes and standards. The field of human factors has much to offer, for example, in a philosophical or strategic focus on human-centered design as well in more-prosaic issues such as exit stair width and handrail provision. Much of the available research addresses fairly low-level ergonomic issues such as exit stair width in relation to egress capacity and the impact on evacuation time. in addition to more-sophisticated research into the relatively simple issues, ahead lies more-difficult research relating to strategic issues and the provision of information to building occupants in emergencies, occupants' situational awareness generally, and the many social interactions—in seldom-considered environmental contexts—that are at the heart of major evacuations of large buildings such as in the case of the World Trade Center.