IMPLICATIONS OF COMPUTER SIMULATION AND EXPERIMENTAL STUDIES OF EVACUATION BEHAVIOUR IN THE SIMPLE-SHAPED ROOM

摘要

Performance-based codes, provided by both Building Standard Law and Fire Service Law, haveopened the way for advanced evaluation to safety to fire evacuation in Japan. In order to effectively use evacuationmodels, the simulation model validation should have been enough. In general, the dynamics of the evacuationprocesses is quite complex due to the complex building geometries. And it is difficult to verify the equivalenceof occupant performance data and models in complex situation. Therefore, building geometries wasdivided into simple geometries and experiments of crowd flow in the simple geometries were conducted in thisstudy.This paper describes the characteristics of crowd flow passing through simple-shaped rooms and to validatean evacuation simulation model called “SimTread”. It presents experiments on crowd flow with 43 subjects andintends to quantify the aspects of crowd flow in simple rooms. Recently, for estimating evacuation of buildingson fire, several computer simulation models have been developed and applied. However, human evacuationdata-sets for validating simulation are scarce. The results of this study show that pedestrian flow rate at theopening changes depending on the density of the space connected. Flow rate rises if the opening is connected tolarger space, which is less dense and, in result, increases speed of pedestrians. For validating an evacuationsimulator, evacuation data from actual building fires are too complex for proving the equivalence. Therefore, wecarried out the experiments of crowed flow passing through simple-shaped rooms, and compared experimentaldata with our simulation results. There was a good agreement between the result of experiments and simulations.The differences were less than 10%.