Simulation on Occupant Evacuation at a Public Site Based on SMARTFIRE and Building EXODUS

Abstract

In this paper, the software of SMARTFIRE is applied to simulation a fire process at a long-distance passenger transport station. The results of SMARTFIRE can be used as environment condition of occupant evacuation. The software of Building EXODUS is applied to simulation the evacuation process with and without fire. Evacuation times with different number of occupants are calculated. If the density of occupants is relatively small, pedestrian flow during evacuation can take on a dilute state because of the large quantity of exits on public site. And evacuation time changes a little with the increase of the number of occupants in low range of density. If the density of occupants is comparatively big, the phenomena of queuing up at the exits and assembling at the bottlenecks will take place, resulting in an obviously long evacuation time; The influences of the use ratios of exit are analyzed, and balancing the use ratio of each exit can obviously improve the efficiency of evacuation; The influences of the fire simulated by SMARTFIRE are also analyzed. In addition to the factors of low visibility and low walking speed, the change of evacuation routes and the imbalance of the use ratio of each exit are also very important factors of fire.