Staircase evacuation modeling and its comparison with an egress drill

We study an evacuation process of a four-story building by means of an egress drill and simulations. The evacuation in the staircase is much different from that in flat areas in the building because of some special characteristics, for example, the twisting and descending passageway; the interflow of crowds at the joint of staircase and hallway; the turning behavior at the turning point between two flights. Considering the characteristics of human behavior and staircase structure, we develop an improved multi-grid model for the staircase evacuation. For a finer discretization of space, the key size of structures and boundaries are figured more accurately, and what is more, the rectangular body size, various walking speed in different densities, turning behavior of pedestrians are taken into account in the model. It is found that the interflow between the new entrance students from the hallway and students from upper staircase leads to a congestion in the buffer area which slows down the crowd speed. This area is just the bottleneck of the staircase evacuation. The simulation results are compared with the egress drill data, and there is close agreement between them. It implies that the composed model is reasonable and can be used to quantify staircase egress behaviors. (C) 2008 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.