Assessing safety in buildings and of evacuees considering fire impacts

Abstract

This study creates a fire evacuation simulator considering fire impacts on safety in buildings and of evacuees. Fire dynamics simulation, navigation graph generation, fuzzy logic system, and agent-based simulation are integrated to capture the interactions of fire, building, and evacuees. Indices are proposed to evaluate the safety in all parts of buildings and of evacuees. A fuzzy logic system is built to model exit selection of evacuees concerning fire dynamics. The contributions include: (1) introducing the edge capability deterioration index (ECDI) and path capability deterioration index (PCDI) to evaluate fire impacts on the safety of edges and paths, respectively; (2) presenting a capability (c) index to quantify the fire-affected safety of evacuees; and (3) developing a fuzzy logic system to model exit selection of evacuees. A three-storey building, accommodating a population of 615 individuals, is examined as a case across nine scenarios. The findings include relocating the fire from a non-critical compartment to near an exit decreases the final total c by 3.4% and increases evacuation time by 13.8%. This relocation raises the maximum ECDI at 400 s by 21.1%. They also demonstrate that the shortest path is not always the safest, as illustrated by a specific location at a particular time, in which the safest path takes 83.3% longer but has a PCDI 18.2% lower than the shortest time path. The findings signify the capability of the developed indices in assessing the safety in buildings and of evacuees spatiotemporally.