Towards a Smart Elevator-Aided Fire Evacuation Scheme in High-Rise Apartment Buildings for Elderly

Abstract

Staircase evacuation is the major means of fire evacuation for current high-rise residential buildings. However, its feasibility may be questioned as more and more senior citizens live there in the future. The weakness in physical strength and mobility impairment of elderly people may impede the successful implementation of staircase evacuation. It is therefore reasonable to consider using elevators for overall evacuation in high-rise residential buildings. However, enhancing the fire protection of elevators and efficiently controlling the elevator-aided evacuation operations are two major difficulties for applying elevators in building fire evacuation. Recently, the use of smart control for building facility management has become a hot issue in built environment studies. An enabling solution for smart elevator-aided building fire evacuation (SEABFE) is proposed in this article. The solution supports the SEABFE by determining the safer and more efficient elevator-aided evacuation strategy based on real-time fire ground and evacuation progress on the scene. A simulated case study of fire evacuation in a typical high-rise residential building shows that the proposed SEABFE can be successfully performed. Apart from keeping the elevator operation safe, the planned elevator-aided evacuation strategy may save 38.0% of the time compared with the strategy using only staircases in the scene.

Effect of Different Time Step Sizes on Pedestrian Evacuation Time under Emergencies Such as Fires Using an Extended Cellular Automata Model

“…We will conduct the research in the software written by our team based on the Qt compiler, which is used in other studies [35][36][37], as well. This software can accurately read and display drawing exchange format (DXF) graphic files in ASCII format output by AutoCAD, discretize the read graphic files with one click, select and set different grids (such as setting them as safety exits, etc.…”

A Scientometric Research on Applications and Advances of Fire Safety Evacuation in Buildings

“…Safety evacuation in high-rise buildings is the emphasis in this domain, and it becomes difficult as interior structure and architectural form of high-rise building [110,112,136,155]. People in high-rise buildings are highly concentrated, and some areas have poor mobility for various reasons.…”