Study on evacuation simulation under crowd-diversion condition

Abstract

With the increasing number of domestic buildings, the importance of safety evacuation in case of fire in the buildings has been aware. Occupants in a building will crowd at exit(s) when they evacuate in disasters. The content of this study includes the following: (1) to conduct a literature review on severe stampedes in history, identifying the number of casualties, and to explore existing research on crowd evacuation; (2) to examine the applicability of software packages EXODUS and Unity for simulating occupant evacuation using them for simulations under identical conditions; and (3) to construct simulated evacuation environments using Unity and perform simulations with different combinations of occupant number, space size, exit size, and flow diverter size. The simulation results found that placing a flow diverter in front of the exit could reduce the evacuation time effectively. The best result was observed when the width of the door is close to the width of the flow diverter; it can reduce the evacuation time by about 25%. When more than 60 people were emptying through an exit below 120 cm width, the blocking happened regardless of whether a flow diverter was placed.