Effects of group human behaviour on the modelling of fire evacuation in modern buildings

• Main Author: Wang, Yang.
• Other Authors: Tan Kang Hai
• Format: Final Year Project
• Language: English
• Published: 2010
• Subjects: DRNTU::Engineering::Civil engineering
• Online Access: http://hdl.handle.net/10356/39917
• Institution: Nanyang Technological University

With the development building technology, huge, and multi-function buildings are now more familiar since they are more economical. But at the same time, catastrophes which occurred them now can easily cause big loses, thus simulation of evacuation in modern buildings is attracting more and more attention. A cellular automata (CA) model, which adopts the findings of human behavior exhibited by people who are located in the buildings, is proposed to simulate the emergency evacuation in a specifically building. CA has been successfully applied to simulate various complex systems, such as traffic flow and fluids. It has also been introduced to the simulation of pedestrian flow and the success motivates researchers to further extend CA to emergency evacuation since both areas are similar. This report aims to study the effects of how individual human behavior can be influenced by group behavior on evacuation in modern buildings In order to conduct a more reasonable simulation, group behavior is taken into account in the modeling. At every time step, each occupant will determine the movement direction by considering three factors, spatial distance, occupant density and occupant velocity. Two algorithms, direct algorithm and indirect algorithm, can be used to model the behavior of a crowd consisting of groups and individuals with different movement velocities during evacuation. Comparing with these two algorithms, since direct algorithm is much easier and will cost less time, direct algorithm is chosen in this study. Experiments were conducted at different locations based on gender and age of the target to collect the movement velocities with respect to both an individual and a group. Their movement velocities are then incorporated into the proposed CA model. Currently, this CA model can be used in an emergency evacuation in modern buildings. Even though credible, the results obtained by the proposed CA model cannot be validated due to the lack of experimental information of human behavior. Hence, real tests on human evacuation in modern buildings should be one of the most important future works.