Occupant evacuation process study of public buildings based on computer modeling and simulation

This article is concerned with the problem of modeling and simulation of occupant evacuation process in public buildings under emergent conditions. First, the six floors' building models with two types of staircases respectively are constructed by Pathfinder. Based on this obtained model, 2, 10, 20, 30, 50, and 100 occupants respectively on each floor are adopted to do the simulation. Results show evacuation time almost is a monotonically increasing linear function to the number of occupants when the number of occupants on each floor is more than a limitation, and staircase of bifurcated type can evacuate the occupants more effectively than double-flight staircase. Second, another situation, which includes some obstacle on the stair, is considered, and the results also show evacuation time is a monotonically increasing function to the number of occupants when there is an obstacle on the stair, and the anti-obstacle performance of the double-flight staircase is better than that of the staircase of bifurcated type. © 2014, Baywood Publishing Co., Inc.