Characterization of movement on vertical circulations

Abstract

A few years ago, it began in Portugal the development of buildings fire risk analysis model, named MARIE, composed by eleven partial models according to the factors taking influence on that risk, having the model for the building egress (MEE), constituted by the building description model (MDE) and the occupants' movement model (MMO), already been completed. During MMO development, and due to the absence of national data allowing the characterization and quantification of people's movement kinematic aspects on adverse environments boosting building evacuation, as stated on fire emergency situations, it was adopted Predtechenskii & Milinskii (P & M) mathematical relations. MEE is, nowadays, being improved, regarding both MDE and MMO. These improvements affecting MMO are related, in one hand, with the occupants' behaviour, and, in the other hand, with the possibility of application to staircases of the mathematical relations of velocity and flow with density deduced by Predtechenskii & Milinskii. Therefore, several evacuation drills performed at the University of Coimbra Campus were filmed and analysed, where 321 people were involved, in order to obtain the expressions describing the movement in stairs, and later comparing them with P & M's expressions.

Cruise ships like buildings: Wayfinding solutions to improve emergency evacuation

“…The relationship between architecture and human behaviours is a paramount issue in spaces fruition, especially in case of emergency (Tavares 2009;Kobes et al 2010a;Pinto et al 2012). The safety of a person depends on the possibility to successfully abandon a dangerous area in the most rapid and secure way: the architectural layout and the building components highly influence this result (Kobes et al 2010b;Carattin 2011;Pinto et al 2012).…”

“…The relationship between architecture and human behaviours is a paramount issue in spaces fruition, especially in case of emergency (Tavares 2009;Kobes et al 2010a;Pinto et al 2012). The safety of a person depends on the possibility to successfully abandon a dangerous area in the most rapid and secure way: the architectural layout and the building components highly influence this result (Kobes et al 2010b;Carattin 2011;Pinto et al 2012). From this point of view, architectural spaces with significant occupancy density are critical scenarios in terms of man-environment interactions and crowd dynamics, especially during the evacuation process (Dimakis et al 2010;Ronchi and Nilsson 2014;Nevalainen et al 2015;Balakhontceva et al 2016;Bernardini et al 2016a).…”

Cooperative and competitive behaviour among passengers during the costa concordia disaster

“…Although ship abandonment by the crew seems to be a frequent feature of emergency management in case of disasters involving passenger ships, the way people behave in such situation is still not properly investigated. The literature abounds with mathematic models that describe efficient strategies to safely evacuate a sinking ship considering the ship's architectural design (Kobes et al, 2010;Carattin et al, 2011;Pinto et al, 2012) or the amount of information received by passengers (Ockerby, 2001;Nevalainen et al, 2015). But modelling people's behaviour is not always sufficient to deeply consider all the elements that lead a person to take a decision, especially during emergencies (Marmot, 2002).…”