Engineering egress data considering pedestrians with reduced mobility

Abstract

Summary To quantify the evacuation process, evacuation practitioners use engineering egress data describing the occupant movement characteristics. These data are typically based to young and fit populations. However, the movement abilities of occupants who might be involved in evacuations are becoming more variable—with the building populations of today typically including increasing numbers of individuals: with impairments or who are otherwise elderly or generally less mobile. Thus, there will be an increasing proportion of building occupants with reduced ability to egress. For safe evacuation, there is therefore a need to provide valid engineering egress data considering pedestrians with disabilities. Gwynne and Boyce recently compiled a series of data sets related to the evacuation process to support practitioner activities in the chapter Engineering Data in the SFPE Handbook of Fire Protection Engineering. This paper supplements these data sets by providing information on and presenting data obtained from additional research related to the premovement and horizontal movement of participants with physical‐, cognitive‐, or age‐related disabilities. The aim is to provide an overview of currently available data sets related to, and key factors affecting the egress performance of, mixed ability populations which could be used to guide fire safety engineering decisions in the context of building design.

The Influence of Wheelchair Users on Movement in a Bottleneck and a Corridor

“…Unimpeded movement speed of all participants was measured and analysed with respect to the individual abilities. Expected unimpeded movement speeds (1.47 ± 0.17 ms −1 ) were observed with the nondisabled reference population which is consistent with the literature [65]. Even slower unimpeded movement speeds were observed for the disabled populations, especially for the wheelchair users (0.96 ± 0.35 ms −1 ) and the mixed population (0.71 ± 0.26 ms −1 ).…”

“…Until now, only a few studies considered a more heterogeneous characterisation of participants. This challenge is addressed by a review of Geoerg et al [65] who discussed the influence of reduced mobility on characteristics of movement. Daamen et al [25,26] have performed movement studies with bottleneck configuration considering participants with disabilities.…”

A review on the role of functional limitations on evacuation performance using the International Classification of Functioning, Disability and Health

“…This issue is particularly associated with physical exertion [33,63]. Obesity is common in developed countries, causing severe or complete loss of mobility [19,69].…”

“…In contrast, people may have multiple impairments, and public buildings can often be very crowded, thus adding another layer of complexity to the specific evacuation needs of people with functional limitations. In crowded places, the evacuation performance of heterogeneous groups, including people with several functional limitations and able-bodied populations, will highly depend on the interactions between these groups and the space they are surrounded by [14,19,22]. In a study on the movement of heterogeneous groups trough bottlenecks, it is shown that the higher mixing ratios of wheelchair users and pedestrians affect the moving efficiency and increase congestion.…”

“…A classification of functional limitations can thus be instrumental to distinguish the issues people may experience in performing basic activities. Previous research efforts in evacuation have focused on quantifying the ability of people with mobility limitations to perform evacuation tasks, e.g., see a recent compilation of data available in [19]. These data provide useful inputs for evacuation models and allow inclusion of quantitative variables of evacuation performance [23].…”