This paper provides a brief review of the modelling of people movement during the egress from buildings and discusses some of the questions raised by each type of modelling. Furthermore, it compares the predictions of a selected calculation method with regulatory requirements on means of escape in various countries.

No abstract

No abstract

During the last twenty years a number design methods for calculating the movement of people in buildings have been developed. This presentation briefly reviews some of these modelling efforts. Furthermore, it discusses some aspects of the pedestrian movement and adresses an egress model based on the data provided by Predtechenskii and Milinski. This model is applicable to the evacuation of multi-storey buildings via staircases and predicts the flow movement in terms of time with regard to the building's layout and the interdependencies between adjacent egress way elements. EESCAPE (Emergency Escape) is a computer program based on this model, written in GWBasic language for any IBM-compatible personal computer. The program is built up as a dialogue between the user and the computer, where the escape route configurations (the width and the length of each section) as well as the number of the persons are put gradually during the course of the computation. The program enables the user to change the dimensions of the building's means of escape and the occupant load easily and work out the influence of the variation on the complete circulation system. Recently, the program also calculates the flow movement under decreased visibility conditions on smoke filled escape routes based on japanese measurements about the walking speed of pedestrians in fire smoke.

No abstract