Fire Safety Science Digital Archive

In considering the issue of safety during emergency building evacuations, it is important to be able to make accurate predictions about evacuation conditions and to be able to assess safety levels. Simulation techniques are often used to make predictions regarding evacuation conditions. The two main types of prediction models are crowd flow models and discrete models. We have developed an evacuation simulation system based on the discrete model, which attempts to address the implementation problems of crowd flow model. Our model incorporates characteristics such as evacuee profiles and spatial considerations, and is capable of dynamically predicting the behavior of individual evacuees. The simulation system is primarily designed for buildings in which many people are incapacitated and require helpers in order to evacuate, such as hospitals and facilities for the elderly. We show the results that the evacuation simulation system was used to perform two trial simulations.