Efficiency Analysis of Elevator Aided Building Evacuation Using Network Model

Abstract Due to the reason that the number of occupants in high-rise building is usually very large, the evacuation process of the building would cost a lengthy time, which threats the life safety of the occupants under the circumstance of serious disaster such as fire. Thus to ensure the safety of occupants, different evacuation strategies have been proposed. One of the recently proposed strategies is that fire elevators should be used to aid evacuation so that the congestion level in the stairwell would be reduced. To explore the efficiency of elevator aided evacuation process, a network model for building evacuation is established in the present paper. Factors including the building plan component, the number of occupants and the configuration of the elevator status which affect the evacuation efficiency have been numerically investigated. A first principle for elevator aided evacuation has been summarized. Results also indicate that there is a top limit of the optimization process of the elevator aided evacuation.