Comparative Study on Occupant Evacuation with Building EXODUS and a Cellular Automaton Model

Building EXODUS software is used to calculate the evacuation times and simulate the evacuation behavior. The results and laws are compared with those from a 2D Cellular Automaton (CA) random evacuation model developed by our group. EXODUS simulation is more reasonable than the CA simulation in the case of evacuation from a simple room, but CA model is more reasonable in the case of evacuation in a long corridor after bottlenecks. As far as the evacuation from a simple room with a single exit is concerned, there is a critical value of exit width. The value of exit width should be bigger than the critical value in order to ensure a dilute pedestrian flow, but the value doesn’t need to be too big. The bigger the original occupant density, the longer the evacuation time is. They can be fitted as a linear relationship. The principle of taking the shortest route is not always useful. If the distribution of occupant density is not uniform at each building part, balancing the use efficiency of each exit should be the main principle in order to improve evacuation efficiency. All the above laws can be obtained both from EXODUS and the CA model.