To See Behind the Curtain - A Methodical Approach to Identify Calculation Methods of Closed-Source Evacuation Software Tools

Commercial software-tools for evacuation calculation are mostly closed-source (also called “proprietary”) software-tools. Contrary to open-source software tools users of closed-source software-tools have to trust the technical manual of the software to understand how the software works. For users it is important to know how the model they use works, because without this knowledge results calculated by the software-tool can be interpreted in a wrong way. We will present a methodology how to identify basics of evacuation modelling and how to interpret and understand calculated results in a better way. This methodology should give users a “better feeling” in a very short time for the model they use for evacuation analysis and calculation