Cellular Automaton based Fire Spreading Simulation in Closed Area: Clogging Region Detection

Abstract

Fire spreading is one of the visualization techniques used for re-enacting or envisions the fire incidents for conducting the post-incidents’ responses and analysing the incidents for post-mortem purposes. There are several current researches on the fire spreading incidents that involve the construction of fire spreading simulation which has focusing on the fire development, smoke control, the prediction of temperature distribution during the fire spreading, emergency response’s plans and post-fire damage assessment. However, there are more features need to be explored in the fire spreading simulation and also the pedestrians movement of the affected incident’s area for the future space design development, arrangement and structural improvement that are impactful towards human safety and also useful for the justification and prediction on the pedestrian survival rate during any panic situations. Hence, this research has focusing on the features of realistic scaling of the spatial layout and implementing the Cellular Automata (CA) approach for imitating the near-realistic pedestrian self-organizing movement and fire spreading characteristics at the microstructure level for designing the heat map of the affected area to show the clogging region in the spatial layout while constructing a reliable prediction on the pedestrian survival rate. This clogging region mapping will be useful for finding the existing issues that lead towards high casualties. Based on the experiments and observations, the heat map of the affected area showed the heavy congestions happened specifically near to the ingress/ egress points and narrow pathways that had affected the pedestrian flow rate and caused the 75% of the 352 pedestrians in the spatial layout to burn and die during the fire simulation by unintentionally taking an extra of 43.85 seconds more than the total fire spreading time (13.42 seconds) to evacuate from the closed area building.