Citation

Richardson O, Jalba A, Muntean A. Fire Technol. 2019; 55(2): 415-436.

Copyright

(Copyright © 2019, Holtzbrinck Springer Nature Publishing Group)

DOI

10.1007/s10694-018-0743-x

PMID

unavailable

Abstract

We study the evacuation dynamics of a crowd evacuating from a complex geometry in the presence of a fire as well as of a slowly spreading smoke curtain. The crowd is composed of two kinds of individuals: those who know the layout of the building, and those who do not and rely exclusively on potentially informed neighbors to identify a path towards the exit. We aim to capture the effect the knowledge of the environment has on the interaction between evacuees and their residence time in the presence of fire and evolving smoke. Our approach is genuinely multiscale--we employ a two-scale model that is able to distinguish between compressible and incompressible pedestrian flow regimes and allows for micro and macro pedestrian dynamics. Simulations illustrate the expected qualitative behavior of the model. We finish with observations on how mixing evacuees with different levels of knowledge impacts important evacuation aspects.

Language: en

Keywords

Crowd dynamics; Environment knowledge; Evacuation; Fire and smoke dynamics; Particle methods; Transport processes