Effects of Occupants Age on Evacuation Time for Commercial Buildings
Keywords:
Evacuation time, Commercial Building, Fire stair, Occupant safety, Human behavior,Abstract
Evacuation study for proper evacuation planning before construction of infrastructure of commercial building is very
important. This paper evaluates evacuation time for various orientations of occupants based on their age and provision of including extra fire stair is also evaluated. An eightstoried well-known shopping complex of Bangladesh is chosen here to demonstrate commercial building. Pathfinder is used to calculate the evacuation time, which is evacuation simulation software. The steering mode of this software emulates human behavior as accurately as possible. The results indicate that the old and children must be placed on lower floors because they are vulnerable and slow. Placing them on bottom four floors in equal number resulted in minimum evacuation time of 3000 seconds. In every studied orientation addition of a fire
stair resulted in satisfactory reduction of evacuation time.
