Manabu Ebihara

An Examination Of Feasibility Of Elevator Evacuation Based On Risk Assessment

In Japan, occupants should usually escape by stairways, not by elevator cars in case of a building fire. However, it is reported that occupants used elevator cars for evacuation in several major fires such as the Hiroshima Motomachi High-rise Apartments Fire that occurred on October 28, 1996 in Japan. Moreover, the demand for evacuation by elevator cars has been growing especially after the WTC collapse on September 11, 2001. In this context, we developed an elevator evacuation model to simulate evacuation completion time by multiple elevator cars. Moreover, we conducted case studies with this model to examine merits and demerits of evacuation by elevator cars in consideration of the influence of smoke. Main parameters are vertical travel time and waiting time for elevator cars. As a result, we found that elevator evacuation might be more effective than stairways evacuation under certain conditions such as a 57-story high-rise building with 32 elevator cars and 2 stairways based on an existing high-rise building in Japan.

Review of A Real Multi-story Store Fire by Applying Evacuation and Smoke Movement Interactive Simulation Model

The evacuation and smoke movement interactive simulation model has been developed to handle the evacuation of large populations of individuals with mixed walking capabilities. The advantages of the model are: 1) to handle evacuation of individual evacuees considering variety of behavioral parameters, 2) to handle total evacuation in a multi-story building via the stairs, and 3) to consider interactions between egress behavior and spread of smoke in a building. The system is a deterministic simulation program implemented by the agent-based computer language, Repast. Using this simulation model, we conducted case studies to reproduce the smoke condition and evacuation situation of a real fatal fire of the 1990 Nagasakiya-Amagasaki Store Fire as accurately as possible reflecting the facts from the survey. The calculated results of case studies well agreed with the investigated pattern of risk in evacuation behavior linked with the smoke impacts by the model. We also demonstrated that our simulation model is useful enough to examine possible changes of consequences according to different egress scenarios in order to find possible future issues and solutions for the problems regarding the total evacuation in a multi-story building.