The influence of the location of emergency exits over the distance to be covered to the exit of an environment

Abstract

In a building environment design, the positioning, size and quantity of the exits are fundamental aspects and have an intense relationship with the fire safety of the environments. An aspect that is influenced by these parameters is the average distance to be covered by occupants to the nearest exits during an escape in an emergency situation. The average distance could be used as a complementary measure of the safety of an environment (a lower average distance value indicates a probable faster evacuation rate). Thus, a pathfinder type algorithm to determine the value of the average distances to be covered to the nearest exit during an escape of an environment was detailed and implemented. Computational experiments were performed and the relationship between positioning, quantity and size of the exits and the value of the average distances were studied. The main conclusion was the importance of keeping the exits as far away from each other as possible in a given environment, so that a small distance to be covered could be obtained.

Optimization of Building Exit Layout: Combining Exit Decisions of Evacuees

“…During the evacuation process, exits are the main way and important design factor to ensure the safety of persons in buildings [24], and the building exits should be designed optimally to maximize evacuation efficiency. Besides the evacuation time [2], the average distance of evacuation [25], exit utilization rate [26], and the relative distance between exits (RDBE) [12] have proven to be a metric for measuring evacuation efficiency.…”

“…Bina and Moghadas [28] presented a framework to analyze the impact of different architectural designs on evacuation via building information modeling (BIM) in a dynamic computational model (AnyLogic code). Braga et al [25] proposed a pathfinder type algorithm to study the relationship between location, quantity, and size of the exits and the value of the average distances.…”