Fire Safety Science Digital Archive

This paper focuses on the use of a network analysis approach to solve the fire safety problem associated with the spread of smoke and the probability of escape by the occupants before the fire and/or smoke blocks their path. Many random factors affecting smoke production and spread can be accounted for by coupling each smoke spread network to a given fire spread network. Smoke spread is examined for different fire scenarios, and the occupants' egress problem is treated as a dynamic network flow problem for a given fire scenario. The time to detection and to untenable conditions, as calculated from the smoke spread network, determine the time period of the dynamic network under consideration.