The effect of environment knowledge in evacuation scenarios involving fire and smoke - a multiscale modelling and simulation approach

TL;DR

This paper presents a multiscale simulation model to analyze how environmental knowledge influences crowd evacuation dynamics in fire scenarios with smoke, highlighting the importance of individual awareness in evacuation efficiency.

Contribution

It introduces a novel multiscale modeling approach that distinguishes between different pedestrian flow regimes and incorporates knowledge levels of evacuees.

Findings

Knowledgeable evacuees reduce overall evacuation time.

Mixing different knowledge levels affects evacuation efficiency.

The model captures complex interactions between fire, smoke, and crowd behavior.

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.