A model for simulation of crowd behaviour in the evacuation from a smoke-filled compartment

The modelling of crowd evacuation from a building has been studied over the past decades. In this study, a numerical model based on cellular automaton is proposed to simulate the human behaviour termed “flow with the stream” in emergency evacuation from a large smoke-filled compartment. In the model, the smoke effect in the context of visibility is considered since visibility range can affect the human behaviour significantly. To simulate the reality that the smoke concentration in a fire compartment is not constant, the proposed model is developed to deal with the scenario in which the visibility range varies in the course of time. An empirical formula is incorporated into the proposed model to estimate the visibility range. The results of numerical tests show that the proposed model can also be used to investigate the effect of the number of guiders through case study.