Evacuation dynamics considering pedestrians' movement behavior change with fire and smoke spreading

This paper proposes an extended Floor-Field (FF) model to study the pedestrian evacuation dynamics with the influence of the fire and the smoke spreading. The spreading of smoke is from top to bottom, which leaves less and less room for the movement of pedestrians. And thus, the movement behavior of pedestrians is divided into three stages: normal walk, bent-over walk, and crawl. In the new model, the influence of the fire and the smoke on the movement of pedestrians is modeled by the fire floor field and the smoke floor field respectively. Numerical simulations are carried out to study the evacuation dynamics under fire and smoke. The influences of personnel density, fire location, exit width, fire spreading rate, and smoke spreading rate, on the evacuation efficiency are analyzed in detail. The simulation results show that the pedestrian evacuation dynamics is highly related to fire location in the room and the spreading rates of the fire and the smoke. Those results can bring some guidance to design the building structure and make the evacuation strategy in emergency situation. (C) 2016 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.