Extending and validating a theoretical model to predict the effectiveness of building evacuations

Abstract

To predict the effectiveness of building evacuations is a very difficult task in the general case. In a previous work, the historical results of 47 evacuation drills in 15 different university buildings, both academic and residential, involving more than 19 000 persons, was analyzed, and a method based on dimensional analysis and statistical regression was proposed to give an estimation of the exit time in case of evacuation. Comparing this estimated exit time with the real values obtained in evacuation drills, more informed decisions on whether to invest in more training and/or preventive culture of the occupants or to invest in structural improvements of the buildings can be taken. In this work, we both propose a refinement of the method to calculate expected exit times, that leads to an even better adjustment between predictions and real-world results, and we use this refined model to predict the results of evacuations of a new building, whose use and characteristics are different from those previously studied, and whose data was provided by other authors in the bibliography. We show that there exists a correlation between the published results and the predictions generated by our model, both from a quantitative and qualitative point of view.