Study on evaluation of safety evacuation in buildings based on performances

Fire protection design is one of the most important aspects in building design, so it is very essential to carry out safety evacuation evaluation for persons in a building fire. This paper analyses the factors affecting safety evacuation in buildings from the viewpoints of performanced-based design and discusses the necessary performances and evaluation programmes of safety evacuation, including smoke production and spreading, escaping ability of persons, escaping routes and escaping policy. Finally an example is given to show how to use computer simulating methods in crowd evacuation . The paper aims to give some guides of performanced-based design to our country both in theory and method. The paper includes the following contents: (1) Evaluation of safety evacuation mainly lie in: building design, crowd ability and fire scenario. (2) Smoke plays a very important role in escaping, so the time of smoke falling to a critical height is essential. (3)Clear escaping routes is necessary in safety evacuation, for example "bottle-neck" is an impediment for evacuation. (4) Traditional calculation methods can not give correct evacuation time, now applying computer in simulating evacuation is very popular.