Fire Safety Science Digital Archive

This paper describes the further development of the evacuation software 'Simulex'. The aim of the research project is to develop a computer model for evacuation which has a strong scientific basis for the simulated movement of escaping people, and can be readily used as a research and design tool. The software has been written by researchers at Edinburgh, in collaboration with staff at Lund University. The project has been funded by The Swedish Fire Research (Brandforsk) board and The Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council. The software is capable of modeling large, geometrically complex buildings, with multiple floors and staircases, and accepts CAD generated files to define individual floor plans. Thousands of individual people can be accommodated, and the user can view the movement of each individual at any point in the building at any time during the evacuation. A text file which contains detailed information about the evacuation process is produced at the end of a simulation. These capabilities represent significant advancements in the software described previously by Thompson & Marchant [8].