Evacuation Safety and Time in Apartment using Egress Simulation

The special act for the management of disasters in super high-rise buildings and complex buildings with underground connections included the installation of a certain area of evacuation safety layer within 30 floors for high-rise buildings. However, for high-rise buildings with 30 stories or less, there is no separate regulation for evacuation safety floors. For high-rise apartments with less than 30 stories that do not have regulations for evacuation safety floors, an underground parking lot can be designated as a refuge shelter-in-place (SIP). This study aims to provide an optimal evacuation plan for evacuation simulations in high-rise apartments. This plan will ensure that the occupants are safely evacuated to the refuge SIP within a minimum timeframe. Evacuation simulations are conducted to establish an optimum evacuation plan. This is because there could be delays in the evacuation time as well as human casualties when evacuating to a SIP using stairs for the elderly and the disabled. Therefore, the elderly and the disabled use elevators to evacuate. The scenarios in this study were simulated on the basis of the number of occupants, the speed of the elevator, the number of evacuation stairs as SIP escape routes, and whether the elevator was used.

Egress Simulation Incorporating Social Relationships by Using Scalar Field Method

Research on human evacuation is heavily dependent on simulation. However, many of the models developed to date lack realism because of their inability to adequately simulate social relationships. In order to create a better tool for studying human response during evacuation, an agent-based model is proposed based upon a new technique termed Scalar Field Method (SFM). Drawing on analogy to a charged particle in an electromagnetic field, both human will and social relationships are converted into virtual potential energies (VPEs) to simulate the interactions that occur between an agent and its surrounding entities. Each agent has stochastic characteristics, is independent and makes autonomous decisions on behavior by minimizing the VPE. Preliminary tests show the ability of the new model to mimic reasonable evacuation behavior, and its potential for exploring the significance of social relationships during egress.